Eco-Dyed Autumn

Last week’s Art Journal Adventure prompt was the last in the series provided by my friend Jana.  Her prompt was “changing seasons” but her tutorial also focused on demonstrating eco-dyeing.  I was inspired by both.  Unfortunately, it was one of those overwhelming weeks – a pretty stressful one actually – where I had very little time for art.  I, therefore, recognised that my ability to dye papers within that week was going to be pretty limited.  I have wanted to try eco-dyeing since I saw a blog post by Claudia McGill all about making parcels of materials that would leech colour into paper over time.  Jana demonstrated a sped-up process that produced similar results.  I am definitely going to give it a go.  I just need to have a chunk of time in which to gather my materials.  So, in the mean time, I resorted to dyeing book pages – some of which were already a little foxed – using tea, coffee, and steeped onion skins.

I had a page in my art journal that I did not know what to do with.  It was the reverse of the page that I had handstitched so it was full of ugly, messy knots and stitches.  I decided it could form the basis of a textural background for this page.  I scraped gesso across the page roughly so as to somewhat embed and fix the thread of the stitches and I kept the gesso rough and splotchy so as to add more literal and visual texture.  I then scraped across some light brown paint to create a neutral tone in the background, especially given that the “changing seasons” prompt was making me think of the colours of Autumn – and man am I looking forward to Autumn.  Thinking of the glow of Autumn light, I scraped some bronze paint across the page and spattered gold paint at the top and bottom.  All that remained was to decide how to incorporate the eco-dyed paper into the page.  I decided upon circular, hoop shapes because I was thinking about the cyclical nature of the seasons.  I cut some in different sizes from the dyed papers and adhered them to the page.  Part of me thinks the page needs something more but I was out of time and out of ideas so, therefore, for now at least I consider this art journal page done.