playing

With plastic in my case. Hi, Natalya here to declare that I have fallen into a deep dark hole that is called experimentation. What if I try this? What if I now do this? What if.......

You would think that after playing around with a material for a while, let's say a year, you run out of the "what if's". Not true in my case.  At least not with the recycled plastic shopping bags. Or dryer sheets for that matter. Here are few detail shots of my recent experiments:

layered with packing material batting, stitched and painted with acrylics

dryer sheet painted with gesso

plastic drop cloth, drawn on and stitched

translucent plastics layered and machine stitched

layered, stitched and sponge painted with acrylics

It's a good thing that there are some deadlines looming, as they make me finish my experiments and draw conclusions. But the experimenting goes on even with the deadlines, it's so much fun I can't help myself. I must find out what if.....

What are you experimenting with?

In the Shadows

Kathyanne here--When I started my Empty Spaces piece I worked on it for awhile and it was getting pretty dense so I did what I do a lot with my art.  I took that piece another way and it no longer fit the theme we had decided on.

Now what?  Since I had been playing with tiny digital pieces cut from digital prints on wire mesh I was fascinated with all the open space, the shadows and depth the assembled pieces created when combined with wire and mesh.  Turning my ideas into pages I used elements from one of my unfinished pieces and started to put pieces together. 

I had no plan on where this was going, so I worked through it without photo documentation and just worked it out a bit at a time.

Materials included- digital print on metal mesh, digital print on wood veneer, copper wire, crocheted brass wire, brass mesh, aluminum mesh, waxed linen, hardware cloth, black and white beads and assorted colored metal wire.

Here is a shot of the whole piece and a couple of the pages.

Introductions: Kathyanne White

Hello, I’m Kathyanne.  My body of work is about building textures with digital alternative surfaces.  I look to build textures first in the image that will start my piece and then take the image and digital print to a new dimension.  I love to build surfaces uncommon to digital printing, alter and assemble my surfaces with other mixed media techniques and share my process.

As long as the surface created is within the thickness parameters of my printers, I will print it.  Below is a piece that I just finished.  The images for the prints come from patterns and texture created from pictures taken in forests.  The digital prints are on recycled dictionary pages coated with inkAID Semi Gloss Precoat. Once the prints were dry I coated the papers with ice resin.  The papers have been torn randomly, a hole punched through the surface and the pieces strung on cotton cording.  The strands of images are are crocheted into the final configuration and mounted on an under layer of crocheted jute twine.

start

finish

As I move forward, my Forest Book series will be absorbing most of my artistic hours in the next year.  Here is an example of a book that is growing as I add pages.  The basis of this series is to build surfaces that jump off the page and are inspired by my visits to the amazing forests on this planet.  In the pages you see here I have printed aluminum mesh, copper mesh, recycled printers plates, sheet metal, lutradur, watercolor paper, tyvek, and an assortment of paper and fabric too long to mention.  I added materials such as twigs, wire, twine and anything else I could think of to build textures on the pages.  Since each page is on a separate metal frame measuring 2 feet by 4 feet, I tend to add and change the pages around until the book is ready to leave my studio.

You can see more of my work on my Kathyanne White website and at KathyanneArt that includes tutorials and workshops based on my work.