"I begin with an idea ... and then it becomes something else"
~ Picasso

Friday 28 April 2017

Surface Treatment Workshop - week 9

For week 9 of the Surface Treatment Workshop my sister Evelyn and I explored the properties of
Golden Medium Fiber Paste.  Fiber Paste is a runny white paste with a grainy texture which can be applied to paper to make it flexible like a fabric and, once dried, has many uses and applications.


I used a palette knife to apply some of the paste to a few sheets of A4 paper and left to dry.

For my first few samples I tried printing some vintage images on the fibrous paper by loading
the fiber paste paper into the paper tray of my inkjet printer.


You can see that the fiber paste paper has an intense grain and a lot of the detail was lost compared
to regular printing (below) so, personally, I'm not really keen on the effect and the “grain" is a
negative thing for me.  Evelyn printed a couple of her photos in colour and hers were lovely.


below ... just playing with the depth of field
and giving the woman big feet and long legs


The next few samples are about embedding.  "Snippets" can be embedded in wet fiber paste and, when dry, it can be painted too.  I decided to check out these qualities by making a collage using up snippets of fabric and cutting up pieces of art work.


I spread fiber paste over an A4 sheet of paper (100gsm) with a palette knife, then quickly added snippets of fabric and bits of artwork into the wet paste ... then left to dry.  The paste was like glue and the snippets were very well embedded in the paste.


Then I painted around the snippets using watered down acrylics and blending the colours with more water.  Next I ironed on gold foil which picked up and highlighted the texture

some details …

[brown/gold textures]



then I cut up into six pieces and re-arranged

Now a lovely positive thing about fiber paste on paper is that it's very flexible.  It gives a sheet of paper the quality of a fabric which means that I'm able to sew into my little samples if I wish and now I'm beginning to like fiber paste ...


I also used the fiber paste through a stencil.  When the fiber paste was dry I painted with acrylics and h2o paints and later I ironed on some gold to enhance.


and ... finally it's possible to rust fiber paste paper ...



samples below are ...

left - rusting in wet fiber paste
right - rusting after the fiber paste has dried


In conclusion, I doubt I will use the rest of my pot of fiber paste so I'm going to hand it over to my sister who loved it and will actually use it with her lovely photography.

next up - drawing grounds

5 comments:

Evelyn said...

A lovely interesting collection of samples - lovely collages, especially the mussel shell ones... !

Magpie's Mumblings said...

I was enjoying the samples - until - I saw the rusty ones and I am pretty sure my heart skipped a beat. I LOVE that!!!

Carol Rigby said...

I like the result of the photographic print on the fiber paste. The difference in the rusted specimen's are very interesting. They are so different.

Tanya Rogers said...

Love all these experiments - great results too! x

Jean F said...

I too love all these samples,i think the colours are beautiful.