First of all I wish to apologise for being such a bad blogger! I have just been caught up in lots of 'life's stuff' at the moment and haven't really had a lot of spare time on my hands.
Anyway, we have moved onto a new 'block' of lessons in Art and this time it's Mixed Media!! Yay!! ....I get to play!!! lol.
We had the choice of four themes, but I picked 'The/my environment, simply because it was carrying on from the last block and I didn't need to kind of freak my poor brain out trying to concentrate on something else!! Lazy I know , but, hey, my poor wee brain has enough to think about just now! !
Enough rambling for now.....as I said earlier, I have chosen The / My Environment and of all things i chose to do it just HAD to be the Oil Refinery at Grangemouth!! .... Jeez... NOT very creative I hear you say...buuuuut... there IS a method in my madness because I am also working on stuff that is made with oil or derivatives of oil. So you see, it all ties together, AND it will tie in with something I have planned for further into this lesson!
So lets get down to business then shall we?..... First off all these to pages are supposed to represent the positives and negatives of the Refinery, and it's seems to have turned out ok. Had an absolute blast (sorry) putting it together but boy was the prep work a nightmare....took forever!!
BACKGROUND
Is done by roughly painting a base of gesso on both pages, when dry I then sprayed lots of water and used Dylusions Black Marble and Melted Chocolate spray inks, sprayed more water then just let the colours run into one another while drying off with a heat gun! Was looking for an "oil slick" look! I sprayed some Fireworks Interference Blue over the top of all that, wanted to get and "oil on water look"! Really pleased with the background, turned out exactly as I imagined (for a change)!
LEFT HAND PAGE
The large cooling tower is done using sandpaper! along with a dried out baby wipe for the steam!
The "pipes" at the bottom are actually Allen Keys that were freebies form flat pack furniture from Ikea and are coloured using alcohol inks to give a kind of rusty look.
The cogs are die-cuts from mirri card and coloured using alcohol inks!
The oil drums were done by dragging dollops of white, green, brown and black acrylic paint along the page with an old bank card again to achieve a rusty look. when dried I just sketched the drums using some fine liners!
The "oil " is done with melted UTEE, Black and Interference Blue melted together in the meltpot and then dribbled onto the page. I wanted it to look like the oil was being poured from the drums!
The Flaring tower is sketched with fine liners and then water coloured. I used some yellow and peach/pink fusible fibres for the flame.
Here are a couple of close ups of the details.... the "pipes" and also the "oil"
And here are the oil drums....
RIGHT HAND PAGE
The trees are done with twigs from my garden and covered with parcel tape! Not the self adhesive shiny stuff but the horrible licky sticky stuff! I used a wet sponge! Wasn't going to lick THAT! YUK! lol They were coloured using alcohol inks!
The painting is a little chipboard frame again coloured using alcohol inks, and the painting is actually done on a "mop up" piece of kitchen roll from an earlier project, I just used a stamp from my stash to give it a little interest and 'hung' it from the tree using a piece of string.
The flowers were done on coloured book pages using a stamp from my stash with buttons for centres.
The paint palette is sketched and i used a versamark pen and some embossing powders from my stash for the paint, added a wee cheapo paint brush to finish it off!
The "rainbow" paint pots are courtesy of a colour swatch brochure from B&Q!!
Quite a "Dark" piece but to be honest, despite the fact that I live not too far from the refinery it DOES have its advantages....I mean I would never have been able to study art at college if I couldn't use paint because there wasn't any oil to make it with!! lol!! I KNEW I would tie those two together SOMEHOW!!! lol..
So there you have it, this is what has kept me busy over the weekend! I sincerely hope it was what my lecturer was looking for!!
Take care everyone and thanks for dropping by!
Jackie x
