I'm not sure what I was thinking with this latest project. It ended up more than just a little bit bonkers.
For some bizarre reason I decided to see what I could do with some cardboard scraps which any sane person would surely have thrown away.
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Some years ago, for my partner's birthday party, I made some bunting which included a line of cycling shirts, a line of kayakers and a line of bicycles.
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I cut out the shapes on my silhouette machine, which you can see in the top of this picture, and strung them onto lines.
I couldn't find a photo of the completed project but you can get an idea of it from this picture I took more recently.
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After cutting out the shapes I was left with the bits of cardboard from which they'd been cut. I have no idea why I kept them but when I came across them recently I decided to see if I could do something creative with them. Wanting to utilise every last bit I used a paper punch to cut out some flowers and Christmas trees where there was space enough to do so.
Then I stuck them with washi tape onto some book pages, wondering what texture they would create if I layered papers on top of them.
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To give me a more even substrate on which to work I painted over the sheet with white gesso.
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Next I glued on 3 pieces of sewing pattern. Don't ask me why I just did. OK?
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I dripped on a variety of alcohol inks, thinking they would soak into the paper and spread but I think, unlike regular tissue paper, sewing patterns must have some sort of coating on them probably to strengthen them. As a result the ink didn't really sink in. Oh well. Lesson learned.
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Next I scribbled on oil pastels in between the ink blotches. I thought they might pick up the texture from the cut outs in the cardboard but, except for in a couple of places, this didn't happen.
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To make the cutouts a bit more prominent I used a black market to highlight some of them. Then I drew on some stems and leaves and added white spots to some of the leaves. And I'm left with this.
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I've no idea what I'll do with it, if anything. Ironically, the thing that started it all, the cut out cardboard, makes it a bit unstable to use in other projects. There's a possibility I could make it into a journal cover if I strengthened it but it's more likely to end up in the bin.
I took pleasure however, from treating it as an instant stained glass window by holding it up to the attic dormer. Ah the little things.
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What ever you're doing today, may you have fun doing it. 💜