foil print fun

This is an artwork on cartridge paper, using black gesso, watersoluble crayons, black ink and black Pitt Artist pen. I completed the artwork, but it is actually a failed attempt at a new technique. My friend (Helen) and I decided to try a technique from Mary Todd Beam's book "The Creative Edge"... but we made a booboo and it didn't turn out the way it was meant to. But if you are making any art at all, it is not a failure, so we carried on and had fun with what we had anyway!!

The first stage was to brayer black gesso onto aluminium foil.

It needed to be a fairly thick layer. Then you needed to wait for it to partly dry.

This was where the booboo happened! You had to wait for the shine to dull to know when it was ready. But we waited too long and it dried too much.

Then we turned the foil over onto our cartridge paper and using a pencil, and shapes, and sticks, and the side of a ruler, we drew loose shapes and patterns onto the back of the foil.

You can see that we ended up with lots of tears in the foil because we had to scratch the heck out of it to get anything to transfer over to the paper!

When I peeled off the foil it looked like this... it was meant to be covered in heavy and light black lines and shapes all over the page. So my result is very sparse. But like I said, bad art is still making art, so we made the most of what we had.

Nervous that I would lose what black gesso I did have on the page, I sprayed with fixative first to preserve all I could. Then I leapt in with watersoluble crayons and coloured and washed to my heart's content. The finishing touches were stamping the word "icarus" and then the feathers, and decorating more with black Pitt Artist pen.