Tag Archives: paint

Etsy Update 6-24-2008

Just a quick update about my etsy shop.
I've got loads of items up there though I've not been posting about them.

You can find the following there:
9 sets of Jotter notebooks
5 hedgehog or moleskine style journals
11 various styles of recycled journals
1 large leather journal
2 art supply rolls
1 sewing cradle
 See everything here!

Hump Day #13 Sharpie and Gesso

Hdprompt_4

The prompt is open ended and deals only with the material, subject and content are up to you, but the material is dictated.

The next material that I want to write about is actually a combination of materials but it’s a very cool combination that will give you a ghosting effect. The 2 materials are plain old Sharpie brand markers and plain old white gesso. I use Liquitex brand gesso but I think this would work with any brand.

Start out by writing up a journal entry in sharpie. You can use any color, I’ve done this techniques successfully with black and red but I’d love to see results that use other colors. After giving the sharpie some time to dry fully, go over your lines of text with gesso. A nice even thiin layer. There should be no need to thin it with water but if you aren’t getting an even layer you can loosen it with some water. You should barely be able to see the writing under the gesso while it ‘s wet. The key to this technique is a thin even layer.

Now wait for it to dry. If you are impatient like me you can hit it with some heat and dry it out, but you don’t have to.

When you come back to it you should see a faint purplish bleed through of your writing. I find that mine is barely legible but it can clearly be read. From here you can decide if you want to write on top of the gessoed words or draw or collage. As you layer over the gessoed writing you’ll find it becomes more faint and more ghostly. It makes a great background for more writing, drawing or collage.

Prompt # 13 Combine 2 materials: Sharpie and Gesso.

New Hedgehog Moleskin

Immediately after finishing my last hedgehog/ moleskin I started a new one. This one has distressed brown and black sheep hide covers, is 3.5×5.5 in size and was entirely hand made by me. It got kraft paper pages which is something new for me to work on. I used rough wrapping paper kraft paper for the pages too so it has a great texture for drawing and such.

So far it has been taking every sort of abuse I can hand to it, thus far in this book, I’ve gesso’d pages in clear and white, tinted pages with acrylic, glued in magazine pages with matte medium, sanded gesso off the pages, added layers of magazine, acrylic and ink. I’ve scraped with a pallet knife and credit cards. I’ve wiped on and off with a rag. All in all this paper is tough as nails. Unlike the 140lb printmaking paper it does cockle a bit but after drying it smooths out quite a bit. I’m very pleased with the amount of abuse that this book has taken, and to think that this books was one I deemed unsalable because I screwed up and trimmed the cover short. (Note how far the fore edge pokes out from the cover. Looks good with this but not so good when first made.)

After you get done looking at these pictures head on over to my Flickr account and see more pictures. I didn’t load them all here because it takes longer but at flicker you can see all the spreads thus far that are in the book.

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