2023 Topic 11: Monochrome {by Asia Marquet} with Purple & Seth Apter stamps

Hi everyone,

It's Asia here with you today (Lemon Creation Art) here with you today.

I would like toshow yçou how I created an art journal page on black background. We do not usually use black papers for our projects, but lately I got to loke creating on black and playing with opaque colours. Some of these colours look better then others on the black background and I am always happy to experiment!  That's why the topic Monochrome spoke to me straight away. PaperArtsy has so many opaque acrylics, which are just perfect for it. Plus, there is an addition of Topography theme this quarter and I am crazy about letters and numbers! In all- just a perfect theme for me.

Today I am going to show you some of the opaque purple colors, make an art journal page perfect for beginners, but with some cool technique for advanced artists as well and  tell you about the common problems when working on a black paper.

Here are the supplies I will be using today, but let me first start with the paints and my black paper.

The first thing while working on a black paper is to choose well your colours (in my case one colour, so it was even more important to choose well). Why I choose purple? I love purples and I have to say that PaperArtsy has a lot of opaque purples, so it was just a question of finding one and get the most of it.

To this end I decided to do the swatches and I strongly advise you to do the same when working on black paper. As you know  the colors will look differently on black and a lot of them will not even be visible. That's why the opacity of colours is so important here- the more opaque colour, the better will be visible on black paper. So chose wisely and you will create surely a beautiful art!

Out of all thses beautiful purples I decided to go with Berry Nice Fresco Finish Acrylic- I love this particular shade of purple and I found it really opaque and, well, sort of cute :) Cute goes nicely with grunge projects. It will soften the effect of grunge a little and as it is quite bright, it will be a good contrast to black. I will also add a little bit of white with Snowflake Fresco Finish Acrylic.

Of course I can't live without some beautiful stamping and my choice fell today on Seth Apter's stamps: ESA35 and ESA23- amazing choice of grunge!

For grunge project a little bit of mess is necessary. That's why I will start with some random stamping in the background. I will use parts of both stamps and for stamping I will use Snowflake Fresco Acrylic. The stamping will not be perfect, as it will be done with acrylic paint, but it will create grungy background. 

When stamping with acrylics you can either use brush to add the paint to the stamp as I did here (the stamped image will be more precise), or you can just kind of "dump" the stamp into a pool of paint and then stamp it onto the paper (image will be quite blurry and messy). One more thing you need to remember when stamping with acrylics  is to wash your stamps in the soapy water straight away, to avoid permanently damaging them.

Here are some examples of my acrylic stamping- as you can see the images are a little bit messy (what I was aiming for anyway), but also quite visible (you can still see the letters). When doing grungy stamping, you do not really need to keep your stamp on the acrylic bloc, you can just as easily keep it in your fingers and just stamp this way.

Numbers and letters are my "go to" very often when doing grungy backgrounds, so since I have in my stash another one of Seth's stamps- ESA24. I used a part of it to add more interest to the page. 

I did the same with part of his other stamp- ESA23.

If you are wandering what is missing, it's splatter, of course! I had some leftover paint and it was just enough to creat some beautiful splatter.

Now, let's move to the focal point, or rather few focal points.

 

For the focal point (points) I will be using the circle elements from Seth Apter's stamps: ESA35 and ESA23. Circles are such a beautiful form to work with and since Seth's stamps are definitely on the grunge side, they will work perfectly with my background. This time I decided thought to stamps them not on the black background, but on the background coloured in purple.

This colour- Berry Nice Fresco Finish Acrylic-  is just so amazing on the black background and so vivid!

When the background is completly dry, I will emboss it with WOW white embossing powder. The white powder will be contrasting nicely with white stamping on the background (stamping is very mat, while embossing has a glossy feel to it). Thanks to that and the stamping on the purple paper, the focal points will be well visible.

Since I was not sure which elements I will use as focal points, I stamped and embossed few of them. This way I will have a choice.

And of course the last part of this process was to fussy cut them all.

Even though I made my focal points, I was thinking that there is something missing.I wanted to add more purple paint to the page and make the focals a little bit more varied. I was not totally sure if I am making the right decision, but I decided to, once again, do some stamping with acrylic paint. This time with Berry Nice Fresco Finish Acrylic and the smallest  part of the stamp ESA35.

I think it was a good decision. The stamping worked really well and it gave a little bit of different feel to the whole project, which you will see in the close-ups. Sometimes it's really good to mix up techniques to create different layers. Here I mixed embossing and stamping with acrylics, stamping on the black background and on the purple one. These are all simple techniques, but at the end the effect is just so cool. And grungy.

Time for the nicest part of the project- putting it all together! I love this part and today was no exception. There were moments during this project when I was not so sure if all will work at the end ( too much grungy stamping in the background? Too many focal points? Not enough focal points??? ), but now, looking at the finished page in frony of me, I am trully happy.

But before this happiness happened, there were still some steps to take to finish it off.

Firstly I placed my fussy cut circles on the page and tried few arrangements until I was satisfied with it.

Of course I ended up not using all of the fussy cut elements, but it's always better to have too many, then not enough! I cut off the part of one stamped circle (it is a nice thing to add some elements coming a little bit out of the page, it gives more interest to the whole project).

A little bit of purple splatter:

 

And a little bit of white thread placed under one of the circles. Plus a glue to hold it all together.

Here is the finished page:

I do believe that when making any kind of grunge project,  you do not have to stress too much. Maybe this is why I love it so much! In this case I was happy to make it on black background,  as I feel that black gives more of this grungy feel. Plus, I had to use some kind of typography elements on the project and this is one of my all time favourite elements to go to when I am stuck with my background, or when I just fancy adding some random numbers or letters.  But as I mentioned earlier- working on black can be tricky sometimes. The choice of color  you use on the black background is very important, so is the making of swatches beforhand. You need to be sure that your colour will be visible on the paper. Opaque Fresco Fisnish Acrylics will do the job beautifully! Translucent paints won't work on black and you may also get problems with semi-opaque colours, so just make your life easy and go straight for opaque paints (PaperArtsy acrylics has the opacity of colors mentioned on each bottle at the front, so you can be sure what you are using).  

The most difficult part for me while making this project (and any other project on black background) was taking photos. My black art journal paper has a mat finish to it and even despite that a lot of my pics finished in the bin! But it is a question of habbit and I am getting better when taking photos (at least I hope so!). Also, in the period of the year when Sun is nowhere to be seen, working with black paper could be difficult. So do not be afraid to turn the page around, turn the light around and take few pictures, just  to be sure you going to get at least one which is beautiful. I can tell you honestly- it's worth it!  Despite all of this small issues, black journal pages are so beautiful and fun to make!

So just get a piece of black paper, create and share with us your amazing makes!

Happy crafting!

Asia

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2023 Topic 03: Focus on Seth Apter {by Keren Baker} with Seth Apter Products

Hi everyone, Keren here today with a little forage into sewing using Seth Apter's wonderful stamps. I was interested in incorporating different sewing techniques as well as some other things I'd been wanting to experiment with. This blog post for me was going to be more about the journey rather than the final destination.

It turned out that I totally love natural dyeing but not using brown tones so I'll be on the hunt for blues, pinks and greens instead! It also made me want be more artistic with my sewing as opposed to my usual relatively clean and simple style.

I've recently been looking at Catharine Ellis and Caitlyn Irwin and enjoying learning about dyeing fibre and fabric with natural elements like onion, pomegranate, eucalyptus and more. So although I wanted to sew with Seth's stamped images, I wanted to create a fabric colour and also try and fashion a different substance to sew onto (but more about that later). It turns out that onion skins and toilet paper actually make fabulous raw ingredients. Let me show you why!

Here's what I started with- all (except the Gold) being Fresco Finish Chalk Acrylic paints in Seth Apter colours. I actually only ended up using these: Butter, A Bit Fishy, Green Patina, Toffee Apple and Stardust.

I also gathered toilet paper, threads, white mercerized cotton and onions.

I decided against just one project, wanting a selection of tags to act as resource for when the mojo goes missing!

To begin with, it was time to dye! Remove all the onion outer papery skins (I mixed red and yellow onions but really wished I'd had more red and therefore ended up with a more pinky hue. Add enough water to cover the fabric you're using. As I was stamping onto the fabric, I chose mercerized cotton which allows for a more crisp end effect. In order to prepare the fabric, you need to 'scour' it by washing it on a rinse and spin. Now heat the water until you achieve a desired colour.

To keep an even colour, you need to strain the skins and if you use some muslin, you'll usefully also have that dyed for another project.

You'll end up with a coloured dye. Pop it back into your chosen boiling implement (which ideally will be stainless steel and reserved for dyeing) and heat again.

I wanted an ombre effect so only dipped a portion of the fabric and kept splashing up dye intermittently. The fabric will dry a slightly lighter colour so you need to keep that in mind. Dry naturally and you are ready to use it.

The other preparatory steps were to do some basic paper casting. Super easy and a great way of adding texture that's lightweight to any project. Grab these supplies:

Spray water over the stamps. It's helpful to have them on an acrylic mount. Grab your toilet paper- it doesn't matter if it's embossed paper as it will flatten out. Add a layer, spray that, add another layer, spray that too. I used 3 sheets. Make sure it's really wet,(but not sopping) and gently push down into the grooves of the stamped image. Press carefully so not to tear the paper. Leave to dry.

Once totally dried, remove from the stamp, trim and you end up with some amazing casts. Just be mindful that if you add too much moisture or wet substance, it's likely to flatten again.

My fabric once dried was a little disappointing. I loved the ombre effect and the texture before ironing but didn't love the colour. I loved the paper casts and couldn't wait to use them. Now I needed to add these elements to the project tags and get sewing.

 

Time to stamp. I grabbed two Seth sets: ESA23 and ESA25.

Stamping using paint is easy enough but application is key. I found it easiest using a foam applicator (some inexpensive makeup sponges) and pouncing gently onto the stamp. A good even coat and an even pressure onto the fabric will give great results.

You can see how intricate the images are and the quality of the rubber stamps. I love that Seth's stamps are abstract enough for you to imagine them as different things. I also imagined the larger image as a cabbage too! I added the lines with circles as flower stalks and their parallel positions fitted in well with our overarching theme of 'Tracks'.

I had some linen type fabric for doing hand-sewing. Because it's quite rough, a stamping platform was of massive help here. I used Archival Ink and re-stamped 3 times to get a decent density of black colour. I wanted to build my stitches like brick work and the lines were easy to trace with stitches. Stitched thread 'tracking' around the outer shapes.

One of the elements that surprised me was how with 2 or 3 layers of stitches, the fabric started to bow upwards, as if embossed. I thought it might be interesting to highlight that, adding wadding to the reverse to protect and enhance the curve. I could then add some double sided adhesive layers to affix onto a tag.

 

In my attempt to find muslin when straining, I'd inadvertently picked up some fusible stabiliser. The fabric with the 'flowers' on seemed bare and uninteresting and I thought if I added some green to the top of the interfacing, I could simply iron leaf shapes onto the stems.

As I looked at the sewn tag, it too seemed unfinished. I grabbed some Matt Duralar which I knew would be great stamped and sewn on, and it added that extra dimension that was missing.

Now I needed to add some little details and finish off.

I found incorporating the paper cast flowers really challenging. I needed some colour to contrast them against but equally they seemed too plain to not add colour to them too. I dry brushed some of the colours, carefully blending those that would mix to nice new colours and then added some Stardust in the opposite direction, having a tartan style in my head. The grey knocked back the 'brights' a little too. Adding black embossing powder helped with the textural combination.

Dry brushing paint worked well with the flowers. I did go a little overboard and should have stuck just to the edges. If you flick the edges a little, the layers will start to separate which makes the finished flower a little more dimensional. You can see where I've stitched in the centres. The stamped sleeve of Duralar seemed to help ground the design.

I rarely have 'found' objects- I guess I should look for them more, but as I was trying to finish off the circles tag, I wanted to add some marks (Seth's love of found objects and mark making hadn't been lost on me!) and just dumped the bottom of my white gel pen into the paint and just 'stamped' it around. It echoes the other circles and felt like it helped tie the opaque sleeve with the rest of the tag.

My giant tag was languishing. Adding some French knots and mounting it on wadding then sewing on my machine gave it more structure but I felt like I'd lost the subtlety of the painted flowers. It was done though, so I had just to finish it by mounting on some strong cardboard.

In artistic endeavours, you never love everything. Were it not for the fact I'd learned so much creating the flower tag, it'd probably have ended up in the 'bin of rejection'!!! Here's the three, side by side!

I learned two new techniques, that I will be exploring more. What happens when you add Infusions onto the stamps before or after wetting? What's the final result on the paper casting? What shades can I achieve by dyeing with everyday plants and vegetables or fruits around me, and how can I incorporate them into my art.

But also, I really didn't like the final massive tag with the paint stamped flowers. I nearly used the floral panel to make a journal cover and I'm sorely disappointed that I didn't as the crisp edges of a die-cut journal would have looked much better. I love the faux tartan-esque brushing and will definitely try that one again. 

I was really inspired by Seth's love of mark making and will try and remember to pick up random objects off my desk to add into my projects ;-)

Keren x

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