More Leaf Play

Another project from a couple of weeks ago. This is part 2 of my leaf resist Gelli plate project. Funny thing, when I repeat a project within just a couple of days I am often not particularly "wowed" by the results the second day. It's like caution has crept in and creativity is taking a small vacation. Or your brain is saying "I've already made enough of these things the other day." Maybe because the spirit of exploration is dimmer on a familiar path. Whatever.....Here are a few acceptable ones. I'm thinking of taking one of the blander ones and seeing if I can Zentangle on it. I have a couple pieces with freezer paper ironed on the back for stability that I am going to try this on, now that I have amassed a wide variety of pens.

Rather fat eucalyptus leaves:

This is bamboo made from the stamps that I created in the last session. The bamboo leaves were starting to curl heavily, but I brayered one last layer of paint on them and pressed them on top of my sticky backed foam sheets. I cut them out and pressed with a pointed tool along the leaf vein lines made obvious by the paint. I have a lot of these special leaf stamps now. The central parts are a bit thick, because they would have fallen apart otherwise, but they are way more leaflike than anything I could create on my own.

The background was made with spray colors and dried earlier. Some mixture of these spray paints will cause spots to form rather than blending. I approve.

I need some special techniques to fill these big, solid leaf masked shapes.

High contrast yellow paint over cerise pink fabric scrap. I am now looking for crazy colored fabric scraps, colors I would never be caught dead in, because they make really great contrast.

I bagged some fabric end strips at the last group printing session I went to. Earlier I had made some short stickyback foam stamps based on ideas that had flitted through my head while drawing Zentangles. These first two are a kind of notan, one shape cut out and the cut out part placed next to it. The lowest one is based on a Zentangle braid. Placed end to end, they make great continuous lines, especially the first ones. You can curve them a bit to follow the narrow fabric, without them looking like separate stamps. Must do more of this!

Again, sorry for the black lines, these are from Instagram posts. Last time I had created 6 carved square rubber stamps based on Zentangles. I tried them out as continuous prints on some scraps of fabric.

Here is one:

And here I made some variation by adding a second layer. Again, I feel like this is the tip of a very large iceburg, one that is not in danger of melting any time soon, unlike the real ones....I want to turn some of my smaller rubber scraps into tiny little Zentangle components, to use in conjunction with these blocks.

I've been looking through my posts, both on my blog and on Instagram, which I only started using a year and a half ago. They really are a valuable record of what I have been learning. There is a lot more interaction in IG, but I feel I can express my thoughts much better, especially with the ability to connect them directly to specific images, on my blog.

Today I am fighting off the end of a sinus infection, and I'm hoping to nap a bit, but at the same time I would like to just stop all other activities and start carving and cutting out stamps. I want to keep pushing the limits between types of art. No rest for the wicked.....