Some More Klimt Inspiration and a Stamp Making Frenzy

Above is the end result, only laid temporarily down in my journal because I suffered a severe infestation of cats in my working area.

I got hung up on making stamps this lesson, because I wanted to play with a kind of notan effect by carving the same stamp two different ways. In one stamp I cut out the lines of the design, in the other I cut out everything but the lines of the design. As can be seen in the lower portion of this next photo, this is not precise enough of a method to get an exact register, therefore you can't stamp one over the other and have it look clear. They work best in either a checkerboard pattern, where you stamp with the larger one first and fill in the spaces with the smaller one, or just using the same stamps in lines next to each other. Anyway, I became fascinated with this idea and drew a lot of designs to make pairs out of.

apologies for the black lines, a lot of these were posted first on Instagram, which refuses to deal nicely with long rectangles.

Here are the stamps. The ones where the sister stamps are cut out right to the design lines work best as a checkerboard because of the alternating white background areas.

I thought I was over my stamp carving phase and would just start decorating with them, and then I caught a particularly nasty cold. I am constantly whining about this cold because in the years since I retired, I have hardly ever been sick. And it's especially uneasy-making to come down with a severe sore throat on the afternoon after a morning of buying emergency supplies, "just in case" the Corona virus comes calling to my neighborhood.

So I isolated myself and went into another round of stamp carving, because I really didn't feel up to doing something more active. So here is Round Two:

Resulting stamp pairs:

Playing around with them:

I started to color in some areas with gel pens, but this didn't work very well on calligraphy paper, it started to disintegrate under the heavy layer of wet ink.

Earlier I had taken several sheets of calligraphy paper and sprayed them with both solid colored and shiny sprays. Those photos below with the flash on reflect back a lot of the shine, which effected the appearance even through the stamps. The earlier sheets were only stamped with stamping ink pads, which made a difference also.

Photo with flash on:

Same sheet of paper, photo without flash:

So basically all photos are a kind of illusion. With most of these, I tried to sharpen the image and clarify the colors, because that is closer to what my eyes saw.

Some of the first stamps I used come from two projects, one where I copied a lot of Chinese latticework designs (traced from a Dover book), and the other where I took a walk in the hills and was inspired by things like eucalyptus corns and tree bark and cut tree rings.

Fading into obscurity with the flash on. In truth, the final product will also look obscure if the room is dark. This would be best as the background to something much brighter.

Here I started playing with the new stamp pairs, sometimes holding them in the same direction, other times flipping them, sometimes working in a checkerboard, other times in lines of the same stamp. Also, these stamps have had acrylic paint daubed onto them. The paint shows up much better on colored paper, but the paint will make the stamps extremely sticky if you don't remove it promptly. So I stamped and washed, stamped and washed.....

Most of these are made with metallic paints, Liquid Metal by Sargent. They are not only shiny, they are thicker than a lot of acrylics. But at the end I added white chalk paint and I really love how it stands out.

These last ones were made on rolls of dark green and tan painter's paper, the stuff you would tape around the edges of a house painting project to keep one color of paint off of the surrounding paints. The effect is kind of muted, but it takes the paint well and doesn't mind the application of gel pen details later on.

And here is one last carving project. It is based on this window that I used to walk by on my neighborhood walks. Sorry, all I can find is this grainy-on-purpose photo I took back in the fall. I was fascinated by how the window frames and two sets of disordered blinds interacted to make lines crossing lines. I took the photo from the edge of the sidewalk. Even though the house seemed abandoned, a lot of people live in dilapidated houses that they can no longer keep up, and I didn't want to be invading somebody's privacy. I'm glad I got this photo, because indeed the house was abandoned and in the past month it has been completely cleaned up and put on the market as a "fixer upper". The first thing they did is remove these blinds!

This is the stamp inspired by the blinds, though I would love to do it again, making it more proportionate to the actual image.

I stamped several of them, hoping to turn some into focal points.

Here is how I gussied one up with metallic and fluorescent gel pens. As seen in the first image of the carving, I am cleaning up the cut out sections because leaving lines in them just makes them confusing. I want to take inspiration from my Zentangle masters and make one with shadows added in at the end. I think this is the beginning of a whole new carving/decorating passion. But for another time....

So this is my first collage attempt. There will be more because I have a lot of paper to play with, but I am now lagging wayyyyy behind in my class projects.

Note, the Klimt related posts over the next couple of weeks are associated with a class taught by Nathalie Kalbach called "Artful Adventures with Gustav Klimt. You will find this online class, and others, at https://nathaliesstudio.com/learn/online-workshops/. I am having a ton of fun in this class, though I tend to wander off and do my own thing for days at a time!