Sorry about the title, I couldn't resist!
This is one of the pieces I did at the workshop a week ago. It's acrylic on canvas, with sand, some collage and of course - the secret ingredient - rust!
"FeO"
Acrylic / Mixed Media on canvas, 32"x40"
Like you might have seen in the pictures from the last post, I started out by covering the canvas with a mixture of sand, marmor flour (?) and acrylic binder (resulting in a home-made modelling past) and played with the sand on canvas until I liked the structure and patterns it created.
Once this first ground layer was dry, I poured a fair amount of watered-down black acrylic on the canvas, moving the canvas, adding water where needed (by spraying or pouring from a water bottle). Again it needed to dry. I might then have added a second layer of black (can't remember) and then the next layer, this dark-beige-brownish color you can see on the right half of the canvas as well as the top left corner. Next layer: orange!
So far so good, but then it got to be really fun:
To the top right corner I added (glued in) a piece of stringy, net-like fabric / paper. Something you might use for wrapping up a nice flower or a present.
Then I made a paste out of iron powder and again acrylic binder and gently brushed this onto the fabric in order for it to add to the to 3D quality of the collage, covering only the elevated parts of the fabric.
So the white you can see above is the dried binder, the grey is the dried iron past.
BUT - I didn't want iron but was looking for rust. So the iron part got then brushed on with an oxidation agent in order for the iron to start to rust. It only took about one to two hours for the grey paste to turn into...
... the rich sienna-like orange rust you can see above. I also added some rust to the lower left part of the painting and added some smaler fields of color, scribbles and splashes of colors and white.
And as a final touch I used some colored modelling paste and a stencil to add the lettering you can see.
Voilà!
