Kauri Trees- Bark and Pattern

One of my favorite places in the world is the Waipoua Forest on the north island of New Zealand.  The Kauri trees surrounded by the forest are amazingly textural and their environment is magnificent.  My first view of the mighty Kauri changed the direction of my art.  My pictures taken in the forest have influenced my work since then.  Depicted here are pics from the forest and the patterns they inspired.

Mixing it Up

Mixing up textures creates amazing surfaces.  These detail pics show a variety of digital prints and other elements.  Included in the textures are: digital print on lutrudur, cheesecloth skin, canvas and silk.
Other materials: wire, recycled art quilts, dyed burlap, dyed canvas, crocheted hemp. piece fabric, dyed cheesecloth and denim. The fabrics are cut and assembled through the squares of 1/2" grid hardware cloth. The pieces are drawn through the mesh the way you would latch hook yarn to a canvas without using a latch hook.

Embellishing Metal Mesh

New projects, new year, new ideas.  Working on creating some workshops with alternative surfaces, I was drawn to do some studies with metal mesh this week.  Imagining the possibilities has opened some doors for combing this surface in new ways with my digital prints.  Here are some detail shots of the studies.

Lutradur Texture from Digital Print

Book of Forests 1 also contains a set of lutradur pages.  Depicted here are the front and back of these pages.  The lutradur has been printed with the same print as the watercolor paper from the previous post.  It is then lightly heat distressed, and attached wrong sides together with another piece of lutradur printed.  The prints are then attached with small stitches of metallic thread.

Textures of Book of Forests 1 Continued

Textures featured here are another back to back section of Book of Forests 1.  The top page is a digital print on watercolor paper.  On top of the watercolor page is a pattern taken from the other print.  This pattern is printed on a bark paper purchased from an on line paper company.  It doesn't have the same texture as my amate bark paper, so now my bark paper prints come from my hand made bark paper.

Here is the opposite side of this group of pages.  It has a watercolor paper digital print base. Pieces of watercolor paper are cut with crochet added around the cut shapes.  These elements are then attached to the watercolor print base and attached to the front side before folding and adding these pages to the accordion style book.

Textural Journal Pages

These pages are from my Book of Forest Series.  As usual this collage is based on the textural elements of the forest.  The prints for this page are on Organdy and small bits of watercolor paper.  The page is put together by hand with a variegated thread with twigs for accents.  Here are both sides of 4 pages of the book.  The composition you see is folded in half to add to the accordion signatures in the book.  The treads are loose and hanging, fringy.  This is one of my all time favorite assemblages for my books and is the reason this book remains in my permanent collection:)

Look for more posts this week and next on the textures of Book of Forests 1. 

Metal Mesh Collage Details

Creating textures from digitally printing metals and metal mesh is challenging.  Metals are mostly smooth surfaces.  When you get into metal mesh the grid of the weave shows textures on it's own.  Then there are the surfaces that are such a wide mesh that the ink flows right through when digitally printed.  These need to be altered before printing.  Beverage cans are smooth but have their own individual look when printed.  Regardless how you handle metals the textures are wonderful when treated correctly and printed on an archival ink jet printer.

These detail prints are from one of my pages in a giant Forest Book.  These are studies as I work out any solutions in putting a book of this size together.  Completed pages are posted on my KathyAnne Art Blog.

Digital prints on aluminum screen make up the top left corner. Fine copper mesh is the base surface.  small pieces of printed printers plates and printed mesh are strung with beads and without to enliven the surface. 

Cut outs of prints on aluminum screen are attached to the surface with waxed polyester thread.

Pieces of printed aluminum mesh are crocheted together with waxed polyester thread.

Recycled printers plates riveted over fine metal mesh prints.  For a look at the finished visit go to my KathyanneArt blog.

Encaustic with Paper Clay Textures

The last few months I have been experimenting with other surfaces to print or assemble with printed surfaces.  These encaustic pieces are the first of a group of around 50 that will be attached to a 4 foot x 2 foot panel for one of my forest books.  The are used in a stack of digital prints, dyed fiber, metal mesh and assembled with encaustics.  The affect if the colored wax on the surface of the clay can be altered as you melt the wax and it moves around on the clay.  The fired clay piece is rigid and prevents the wax from cracking.  The background for the clay pieces is in the works and will be printed on lutradur.

The stacks of texture start with a bottom layer of metal mesh,  then dyed and frayed burlap, fired paper clay, digital prints on lutradur and/or paper, pieces of fiber and encaustics wrapped.  These pieces are wrapped with waxed linen.  In the detail pictures you can see the wax lightly coloring the clay  on the screen and encasing some of the textures.  

Digitally Printed Amate Bark Paper Textures

In working with a new series of large size books (see post "A New Idea about Digitally Printed Alternative Surfaces" on my KathyAnne Art blog ) I created some bark paper with the amate bark process.  I used a pound of kozo fiber from Japan, boiled, simmered and cooled the fiber before pounding it into paper.  These pieces are details from a larger piece that is collaged from the prints created.

The bark paper is printed, layered with other prints.  When the paper was made, I left holes and spaces.  In order to keep this see through idea going throughout the collage, I used large pony type beads to separate the layers of paper and tied the beads inside with waxed linen thread.

Textures in Photoshop

When I work with digital images to print on my alternative surfaces, I usually create textures within Photoshop before printing my surfaces.  Putting together a new project this week, I will be doing a lot of printing and am beginning to experiment with images to see what will actually make up to surfaces in the final piece.

Here I have combined 2 photographs and used them to texture each other and blend them for the composition.