I NEED SLEEP
But I am just too slow. 🙁
Regardless of process, final works and even the journal entries, I’m always taking a long time.
Starting with 0 resources.
Giving birth to ideas and materials.
But even giving birth takes 9 months.
So begins part 2 – The painfully slow process
Before I start, just some honest confessions:
I am doing my visual journal in the reverse process- my final composition is already complete and I am recording my process with all my cut up pieces and little pictures I have to showcase the things that I’ve experimented on for this project.
Still, I will still try to make a journal that is clear enough in regards to my entire process in making the lines.
Okay, back to the journal:
Process 1 – Monoprinting
Everybody’s favorite medium. Period.
Monoprinting is the process of making an ink painting by pressing a piece of paper over several textures to produce a final image.
Monoprinting works best as a way to capture the texture of objects on a piece of paper in black and white.
Process 2 – Experimenting with lecture notes
Prof Ina provided us with a set of lecture notes in Automatic Techniques. Many of them were really fun to play with.
Process 3 – Marbling
Marbling. The hardest process that guarantees failure most of the time.
Tools required:
Chinese Ink
Brushes
Paper
Container big enough for your paper size
Water
Process:
Fill the container up with water
Using the brush, dip some of the Chinese Ink onto the surface of the water. The oil-base will the ink to spread across the surface of the water.
Once sufficient ink is used, use the end of the brush to swirl the water to create random wave shapes in the water.
Once done, quickly lower the paper onto the surface of the water.
Lift the paper up to produce a finished marbling work.
Except that it always appears not so ‘finished’.
There are some other good ones
And luckily a very very good one.
Decided to use this particular piece for my final work.
Just by the sheer amount of experiments needed to be able to achieve the texture.
Since I had the container and paper, I did the froissage technique with the ink after its fully mixed with the water. The end result came out with a nice crumpled inked paper.
Process 4 – Crackling
Crackling: The most frustrating and time consuming automatic technique to work with.
The part of me without experience and knowledge of tools really suffered here.
Spent many many hours that ends up in failure due to poor quality in tools used.
Crackling is a fairly simple process.
Tools:
Paper
Brush
White Glue
Acrylic Paint
Blow-Dryer
First, apply a layer of glue on top of the paper, ensure that the layer is thick enough.
Next, apply a thin layer of acrylic paint over the glue once it turns tacky
Blow dry the paint and achieve the crackle effect.
Except that it doesn’t.
What came out was a more wavy effect than a crackling effect.
So many failures
So many different techniques tried
So many attempts
Then, I changed the glue and acrylic paint.
It worked like magic.
All the time. All the effort. All it took was the right tools.
Incredibly huge lesson learnt here.
Process 5 – Burning paper
I tried 3 different things with flames when preparing for the project.
The first was fumage, producing a very smokey effect by passing paper over a smoking candle.
The second was burning the sides of a piece of paper, giving a ‘torn’ feeling but with a more dark and intense edge. Produces a very organic feeling to the paper.
Finally, the third technique I used was burning holes into the pieces of paper.
I bought mosquito coils for this particular technique.
I broke off a piece of the mosquito coil and light it up.
Once the tip has an orange glow to it, I lower it onto the surface of the paper.
After a few seconds, it produces a burnt hole on the piece of paper.
By burning more holes onto the paper surface, it produces and very nice texture and even lines in between the holes.
Process 6 – Threads
This was a technique to convey a specific emotion, fragile.
Not much sewing but a lot of tying/ pasting.
In order to ensure that the strings stay, I have to stick both ends of the strings to the back of the piece of paper.
To create the ‘fraying’ effect, I attached multiple strings to each side of the paper.
Finally, to make the strings stay together, I tie the length of the string using the same thread and cut off the ends. This managed to give the illusion of the string being on the surface of the paper without any obvious adhesives or threading being done.
I managed to achieve the ‘fragile’ effect that I wanted.
Process 7 – Rubber stamping
Simple process of stamping words onto a piece of paper.
Tools:
Stamping tool
Ink pad
Paper
An incredibly tedious process. Mainly because of the marks made by the borders of the stamping tool after pressing it on the ink pad.
To ensure that the marks stay away, had to clean the edges away every time I used the ink pad.
Process 8 – Patterns
My weakest area. Honestly. Even geniuses like Emma Kunz had graph paper with them. I did not. Many attempts to draw grids and shapes, all ended in failure or some disturbing faults on the surface of the paper. Had to retry some of the compositions a few times.
Process 9 – Finger printing
The most fun but incredibly tedious process.
Basically all I did was dip my hand on my ink pad and drew lines on the surface of the paper.
Had to experiment the different feelings conveyed by using different kind of strokes and also the distances between the marks.
Process 10 – Burnt paper stacking
Remember the burnt paper previously, to enhance the aesthetics and make it applicable for the lines, I cut out the different strips and stack them on top of one another. This gives a very layered and organic line, giving it a powerful texture.
Process 11 – Optical illusion
Experimented with white illusions.
It is where stripes of white and black gratings is partially replaced by a grey rectangle.
Despite the grey being the same, it appears to be different colours due to their interaction with the lines.
Illusion worked but aesthetics failed.
Used a charcoal pencil to draw two similar gradients and used a small line of one of them to create a distraction to the big line. Came out very well. Decided to use the line as one of my final pieces.
Basically most of the significant techniques that I’ve experimented on over the course of the project.
Well, this part is finally done.
It took so long to achieve all the results that we have above.
At least I’ll be faster when trying to get the same effects.
Improvement
That’s what really matters right?
Now to the final process.
Once again, thanks for sticking around.
Have a great day
KJ