My wonderful ghastly pink cheap bathmat!
I got this monstrosity on Ebay. Not for my bathroom, but for art! (The bathmat mask in the photo is what I designed to cut from Tyvek – all the shapes are there, but not the additional texture provided by the suction cups on the underside of the mat.)
I finally got round to testing the mat today on the gel plate. I had already cut the rounded ends off and the remaining piece is somewhat larger han the gel plate. I managed to create quite a lot of pretty grungy prints and some pretty indifferent ones too, but nothing is finding its way into the bin because everything is rescuable.
The final ones don’t show the mat texture much. The centre one shows the Golden iridescent bronze fine fluid acrylic really well – this paint is super-shiny and utterly amazing, and worth every penny of its fairly exorbitant price. You don’t need much. Normally I would use it for accents only or for giving a subtle metallic shine when mixed with other paints, and not as overall coverage. You can just make out the impressions of the bathmat texture.
The final three prints are a bit of a mish-mash. The one on the left is the first pull of the session. The middle one is the sheet of printer paper I used for cleaning off the brayer. I love the grunginess of this and shall certainly use it. The one on the right was used to clean off the small cheap gel plate which I use for brayering off or mixing paint. Two pulls (top and bottom half of the sheet) were not sufficient to clean the plate which feels hard and unyielding and doesn’t behave as the decent, larger one does, as far as pulling off any dried paint. There was quite a bit of black left on it at the end of the session which I cleaned off with a baby wipe. The resulting clean-off sheet is great, though – very grungy with subtle colours and a worn out, decayed look. Yum.
A bit of stencil and spray ink
To end my session, I also tried spraying some black ink through my small script stencil onto one of the early background gel prints from the session but it wasn’t very successful. The overspray blot-off sheet is on the right – this is Amazon packaging paper. Both are usable with a bit more work.
I made quite a bi of mess today and managed to make holes in a couple of the tissue paper sheets but generally speaking I am pleased with my results so far with the bathmat.
I am still keeping to my limited palette of browm and cream with my Organic Journal in view. I’m accumulating quite a few papers now and will soon begin to collage with them.
