Screening with fugitive Materials

My previous post talked about making a Denny screen to use with this technique. It took us about an hour to make the screen mixed in with talking, laughing and drinking coffee.

 You can use any kind of fabric to do this; many of us brought fabric that needed "help" - dyed pieces that didn't turn out so well, deconstructive screen printed fabric etc. so most of us were starting with some color. Fabric was places over thin materials that we could use for rubbings. Denny had 3 designated cans for this kind of thing - off to a good start!

 One of the things I loved was a big, stiff lace doilie and some corrugated cardboard.

 Another favorite was the bottom of the plant flat small plants come in (left) and of course our old standby - bubble wrap.

 Another favorite of mine was this black trivit that had circles on it...created a wonderful effect.

There was a wonderful assortment of crayons, oil sticks etc to do the rubbings with. Whatever you use should be water soluble. The Portfolio brand oil sticks were my favorite as they were soft and rubbed onto the fabric easily and added lots of color.

 I started taking pictures of what I used on what to have a record if I wanted to do that again, but I wound up using the oil sticks almost exclusively.

 Kate added more movement (green zig zag lines) to a piece of deconstructive screen printed fabric.

 I added circles to just about everything as I liked the way it looked.

After we marked our fabric, we were ready to seal it. We laid our screen over the top...

so it looked like this.

Using an acrylic medium, colorless extender, or watered down Elmers white glue, we squeeged over the surface of our screen. There are several options to use as a sealer in this part of the process; I liked the acrylic medium the best. Using a screen prevents the marks from moving or blurring. When we lifted the screen up, we had our finished piece (right) which we left to dry.

To dry our pieces, we used an old fashioned clothesline. Wow, does that bring back memories. How many of you had one of these in your yard growing up...I know I did.
A fun day.