Working with Printed Metals

One of my new favorite things is using prints of printers plates, metal mesh and the usual beverage cans and mixing it up with other elements.  I have also been toying with metal mesh printed and then assembled into squares.  I'll show you the cube thing later, but for now here are a couple of the mesh pieces I have been doing for studies.

 This first pic is the study for one of my 2 ft x 4 ft book pages. Created with printed beverage cans-the base is a beverage can in a bark pattern, the next layer is a different can print attached to the top of the base can. I put the cans together with a crochet strip of a paper wrapped metal that I get from a bead store here in Prescott.  This makes the connection pliable and bendable.  Each square has hemp that connects it to the crochet.  I will be printing cans in the next few days to make a similar piece for my forest book page.

 This piece is created in a random manner.  It contains beverage can pieces and metal mesh pieces woven through a piece of black hardware cloth with copper wire.  Yes it is time consuming but pretty much most of what I do it.  Case in point is the piece below.

This has 3 layers- bottom in aluminum hardware cloth in its original silver state.  Over that is a piece of aluminum window screen attached to the hardware cloth with beads and stainless wire.  The top is cut out from a digital print on a printers plate.  The cut out has been wrapped with the same stainless wire that connected the beads.  This is a detail of the piece.

Getting it Together

After spending a week out of town, my to do list became long and mighty:)  Deadlines looming so I put myself right into it.  No matter what I do my table and studio ends up piled with all sorts of stuff I pull out to work on and then it keeps getting moved around.  Here are my tables as I put together some ideas for a workshop.  

Textures Around my Studio

Nothing better then taking a walk on some of the trails around my studio.  A few weeks ago I noticed some  piles of chopped wood that had been laying in the brush away from to road so today I took a closer look.  Some of the wood looks really soft and it all has been there for awhile and is totally weather beaten.  Took some pics and am spending time combining them with other images to print on handmade surfaces, cheesecloth skin and maybe some metal also.  

Mixing Metals

Lately I have been working with digitally printed metals for collage.  Printing recycled printer plates gives me a surface somewhat larger than my beverage cans to use as a base.  Combining other printed metals like metal mesh, beverage cans, wire and found rusty items makes a good mix for dimensional collage.  The pieces here are small and studies to enlarge as I work with metal.  Planning a new 24" x 48" page for one of my large books will start with a base of printed metal pieces then building other 3d elements to build the final page.

The Textures of Water

Merced River in Yosemite National Park is always wonderful for photography.  Constantly changing  water movement is mesmerizing. It's fun to imagine the sound even when you aren't there.

Textures in Bark

Using bark to create textures inspires me.  Plugging images into the shapes of the bark allows other shapes and dimension to appear.  Here are a few textural images from bark.

The Sketchbook Challenge

A few weeks ago, Sue Bleiweiss asked me to be a guest blogger for her Sketchbook Challenge.  Tomorrow my post will appear on the blog.  If you haven't heard of this, you should check it out.  This is an amazing group!!!

Sketchbook- Noun; A book filled with dreams and inspiration.

I am one of those people who creates journals, notebooks, sketchbooks whatever you want to call them all the time, I have tons.  When Sue asked me to write a post I was thrilled. The opportunity enabled me to sort out my existing plethora of journals and sketchbooks.  It was fun discovering just what was in existence on my shelves.   

My mind had been wrapping around doing some full blown studio journals on my new Forest Book Series in order to catalogue the infinite amount of textural elements that appear in one of my huge books. I discovered what type of sketchbooks or journals I wanted to use to for this purpose.  I resurrected a book that was constructed from a recycled hard cover book. This book has never been used and I decided to document my journey on building a textural digital library.  This digital library are textures that can be applied to layer selections in Photoshop as I manipulate images.  

 This afternoon I took 90 photographs of rocks and nature on my property.  Patterns to use as textures on layers were created.  Then small pics to document the process were added to the sketchbook.

 

Textures Combining Images

Last month one of my hard drives crashed and I lost 750 GB of Photoshop files from the last 2 years.  Of course you are all saying- why didn't you back that up?  Probably because I kept saying, I have to back this up and in all these years I never had a problem, I'll get to it. The drive in question was randomly disconnecting itself and that should have been my first clue, but hey I'm invincible aren't I?   That would never happen to me.  This was an exterior drive I traveled with and got into the horrible habit of working on that hard drive anywhere I went since then it was easy to have tons of images ready on my laptop or my desk top. I am trying to be better at backing up my images, but find myself in the process now of rebuilding a library.  That brings me to the textural post for today.

This black and white is a scan of a photograph I developed the old fashion way- in a dark room.  The original image is on watercolor paper an emulsion I brushed on to be able to develop the photograph.  Here is the layering done in Photoshop to give me the final image with textures.  The textures come from the patterns and textures I create and emboss on the layer selections.

A photograph of the Merced River from Yosemite National Park was layered in with the black and white.

Selections from Merced River Photograph with textures embossed.

Final Image

Actually in some ways it has been a good thing to have to get more creative because there is only what is in front of me with images, not what was behind:)

More Encaustic with Digital Prints

These studies include digital prints on alternative surfaces with encaustic. My inspiration is observing the effect of combining digital prints and other elements to build textures with the wax.  In the previous post the base of the encaustic collage was paper clay and the base surface of the clay was fluid.  These compositions are built on Ampersand clayboard which is flat.  Descriptions accompany each image.

6" x 6" clayboard, dyed cheesecloth, dyed burlap, waxed linen, digital print on lace paper, encaustic

Detail

4" x 4" clayboard, digital print on velum, encaustic

Detail

3" x 5" clayboard, digital prints on cheesecloth skin, dyed burlap, dyed cheesecloth, encaustic

Detail

6" x 6" clayboard, digital print on velum, encaustic built up for texture

Detail

5" x 12" digital print on torn kozo paper, encaustic  

Detail