Which Came First, the Chicken or the Ink?

Ink is a fun medium to play with. There’s India ink, an opaque medium that comes in several colors. (Koh-i-Noor is a popular brand). There is transparent ink (Higgins and Dr. Ph. Martin are popular). But my favorite ink of the moment are stamp-pad re-inkers. The ink comes in small squeeze bottles with a dropper tip and the ink is incredibly saturated–one drop can be diluted with a Tablespoon of water for writing ink, or with a teaspoon for a good ink spray. Re-inkers come in a huge variety of colors and brands. The big difference is between alcohol and dye. I prefer the dye, it’s made for papers.

First, I used re-inkers to dye two rectangles of watercolor paper, each about 4 x 6 inches. I attached one of them on the left side of a journal spread, and the other on the right. The one on the left (show above) was left uncoated.

The one on the right was coated with three coats of gel mediums, creating a faux-encaustic look.

In each layer, a different color was added to the gel medium–either gold, or yellow or red. The intense colors created a vivid glossy effect. The piece of paper embedded into the middle layer says, “Losing–and finding–his voice.”

On the left side, I drew a rooster, making the most of the red portion of the paper. I love the effect of the chicken-behind-a-screen. This tied in to the “loosing–and finding–his voice” on the opposite page.

The glossy encaustic look also gives a hint of the rooster’s thoughts of what his future may hold. While many people are using bird images in their work, it is easier to make a raven, crow, or silhouette bird look sinister, and slightly harder to cast a chicken as a noir image. I liked the contrast here, as well as the contradiction and tension between the pages.

--Quinn McDonald is a writer and art journaler who is experimenting with slightly darker ideas.

Best Art Tool: Patience

My studio is full. Full of pieces of paper in various stages of project-becoming. Drying. One of them is coated with Golden’s Clear Tar Gel, the only substance I know that flouts the Arizona atmosphere and takes more than a day to dry.

First layer of faux encaustic collage. At least five more to go. This one is drying.

Earlier today I became fascinated with the faux encaustic lesson in Surface Treatment Workshop: Explore 45 Mixed-Media Techniques by Darlene Olivia McElroy and Sanra Duran-Wilson. Surface Treatment and Raw Art Journaling have been swapping places as #1 on Amazon’s Mixed Media list. The book looked fascinating, so I ordered it. It is a wonderful, useful book on many surface design treatments that work on paper, board, and fabric.

I love encaustic, but a lot of it uses beeswax, and when the inside temperature is about 85, and the outside is 115, as it was today, I just don’t see myself working with beeswax a lot until November. So I was interested in the faux encaustic.

Covered in a flat gel, this ink spray is waiting for a 24-hour dry time. I have no idea what will happen with it, but it's clearly a work in progress. So am I.

The faux work involves using gel medium, maybe with a drop of paint added to look more like wax. It requires long hours of drying, to make the layers distinct. I am not a patient person. but patience is perhaps the most important tool in art.

You need patience to try a thousand ideas. Patience to choose one you want to explore deeply, setting others aside. Patience to not make art simply to photograph it for your blog (I know whereof I speak). Patience to get it wrong and do it over. Again. Patience to get it right and push harder to make it better. Patience is fueled by dedication and polished with repetition, each layer teaching a bit more, taking on a secret glow.

Patience is not easy. It doesn’t come in a kit. You can’t mix it up  at the sink. The worst thing (for me) is that patience come with practice. And practice takes time and effort. But when you work on creative projects, nothing replaces patience. Rushing won’t make art come together faster. Skipping steps won’t create a more integrated project.

Nothing replaces patience, and it is hard to master. I have to pull myself back from stopping too soon, from racing off in another direction when the right path is slow and tedious. I may have to work on patience my whole life. But then again, what else do I have? And what else really works as well?

--Quinn McDonald is still practicing patience. It is possible she is incrementally getting better at it, although the word “practice” seems to be the point.