Mixed media fun

Last week saw me at Cloth Arts Textile Forum in Hunters Hill, Sydney during the school holidays at a week long workshop with Sherrill Khan from the USA.  We worked on both paper and fabric playing with every form of painting medium I think I owned plus a few I'd never tried, so as you can imagine we never stopped all week.
The stamina Sherrill had amazed me as she did demo after demo for us, so generous with her expertise and knowledge.

I don't regard myself as a 'stamping' person generally, only doing the odd monoprint and rubbing, but I fell in love with her stamp mats and found sufficient US dollars lurking at home to buy some from her - can't wait for them to arrive Sherrill!

A lot of the techniques could be found in her newest book "Creative Media" photographed using a lot of American products but Sherrill demonstrated using largely Australian products for our benefit which made it a whole lot more useful.....and cheaper.

Here she is rubbing over her own stamping mats with inktense pencils.

I loved the 3D effect she got with her selection of lights and dark pencils - it almost looks folded in places.

These are some of the sample pieces she brought along and others she did at the workshop for us:

using masking tape as resist

using a glue stick as a resist

I did quite a bit on fabric during the week but put my paper based pieces into the little exhibition at the end.  I worked on heavy bristol board A4 sheets and created a little folding hinged book with my samples, embellished with some felt balls.  The paints here are principally Golden flow acrylics layered which are by far my favourite.  The pigments are so strong and you get a lovely sheen to the surface without trying.

 A couple of closeups of the pages -

 I created little tags with some of the sampled techniques for reference.  The couple on the right are melted wax crayon designs - definitely use that method again.