Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Christmas Elephant Card
Adventures in Bleach Painting
Recently I've been playing around with bleach painting and sketch embroidery on my sewing machine. Here are a few beanbag dolls I made. Notice the super awesome bug fabric that looks like innocent ol' polka dots from a distance.
When I bleach paint something, I find it's best to first plot out what I want it to look like. For lighter colored fabrics I use a soft leaded pencil, and for darker fabrics I use chalk. I recommend using a paintbrush with synthetic bristles to lay down the bleach-- the bleach will eat away natural bristles. Also, I dilute my bleach with water so the reaction time is slower. Paint the areas that you want to be the lightest first (the longer you leave bleach on, the lighter it will be), and lay down bleach on the areas where you only want a subtle tone shift last. I recommend painting near a sink so you can quickly throw on some soap and water as soon as you've achieved the tones you want. Bleach will behave a bit like watercolor, in that if you wet an area with water before laying down the bleach, it will spread out, whereas if you lay it down on dry fabric, it will generally stick to where your brush touched the fabric (it won't spread very much). Also, if you want to bleach-paint a shirt, make sure to put something between the front and the back to keep the bleach from leaking through. I just used a piece of cardboard. You can repeat the process as many times as you like, though I recommend fully drying your fabric between paintings.
Also, for Christmas I bleach-painted a sasquatch onto a T-shirt for my brother, who is currently madly in love with the show Finding Big Foot. My cute squatchy boyfriend is modeling the shirt.
Monday, January 6, 2014
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Four Goldilocks
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| Graphite and gouache, approx 12x15" |
- Elderly Goldilocks. She likes to break out of the retirement community, where the food is terrible and the beds hurt her back. Once she escapes, she then breaks into people's homes, eats their food, and takes naps in their plush, "just right" beds. She's wily, and thoroughly enjoys the challenge of tricking the retirement community employees.
- Bear Goldilocks. She's a bear who, while picking berries in the forest one day, wanders to a part of the forest she's never been, and gets lost. She comes across the home of three humans, goes inside, devours all their food, breaks a whole lot of furniture, and then falls asleep among the wreckage. She escapes with no harm done to her.
- Huntress Goldilocks. I envisioned her as being a cross between Strider of Lord of the Rings-- a lonely wanderer of the land, haunted by an unresolved past-- and Muldoon of Jurassic Park, mostly because I like his short shorts. When she was a child, three bears mauled and killed her entire family, and left her barely alive. Since then, she has made it her life goal to find those bears and exact revenge. One of the bears' claws was left buried deep in her mother's heart, and she will always wears that claw around her neck until she avenges her family's death.
- Banker Goldilocks. She's a greedy banker who is foreclosing on the Three Bears' home. This may be what Goldilocks grows up to become after her first encounter with the Bears. Considering that as a girl she walked into some strangers' home, ate their food, broke their furniture, and then slept in their beds, I'd say she had a greedy streak in her personality at a young age (assuming she was old enough to be out in the forest alone in the first place.)
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
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