On the Surface

Surface design on fabric is a lot like playtime at kindergarden. This will be a small art quilt composed of  using a  gel matte medium to affix the top layer only of  interesting printed napkins or kleenex (they often have 3 layers)newsprint, and handmade papers. I'll show the whole process in this one post so am beginning with the end result, followed by how I got there.

This surely will be interesting to quilt but thats another day.   I began with a background light value  slightly mottled fabric. I chose an asian theme and began placing napkin parts, mounted and unmounted stamps, rubbing plates in areas I thought might work. 

Once I settled on a basic plan, I began by doing a dry brush rubbing  on unmounted stamps used as rubbing plates using my favorite Tsukineko Inks 

I then stamped the foam stamp on the left, followed by the addition of  ink color within the kimono rubbing just shown.  You'll also see now I've added a few small paper pieces of  butterflies, and postage stamps.  The matte medium is first 'carefully applied to the back side of the paperpiees, then  placed atop/ glued to the fabric.  Matte medium dries pretty quickly after which a layer of matte media can be applied atop the paper glued down earlier. 

To unify things a bit, I've mixed Setacolor transparent paints (buttercup , drop of red, and brown) for a subdued orange paint I've applied  here and there to  the background fabric.  I also used a texture plate designed for borders to place square in square images between the 2 vertical paper strips on the left. 

Last thing I plan on is using a stencil and a shiva paint stik to add some background texture.

 A little stencil scrub work and we are ending where we began. It's will be a day or so before I can think about quilting this as the shiva takes 24 hrs to fully dry.