Relief surfaces - starch paste

I had a go at making starch paste acording to Sian's recipe on the stove top but I had to add more water after it cooled because it was a bit of a rubbery brick cold, resembling more of a gelatin mould than wallpaper paste.  However, paste made I added Procion dyes powders to it divided into about 4 quatities.  Like others before me I was surprised at how strong the colours were and then how curled the papers were once they'd dried!  The first few I made, produced interesting cracks in the dried paste once I tried to flatten them.  I have scanned sections of three of these made using brown, olive, golden yellow and red dyes.

 

I then added highlights of treasure gold on to some of these papers but found that the relief was not suffucient to see the metallic touches so chose to make monoprints of metallic acrylic paints on top trying to mimic the types of patterns I had made in the paste.

I also made rubbings over texture plates with metallic Markal sticks.  There are a couple of examples below.