In The Zone......

A relaxing day of being one with my marbling size and reading my favorite books is a good way to begin July!

I really think I am getting better at this and really love the pieces I got today although I did revert to using some blues again (they are just so well behaved and there are so many of them).

This is a try at my orange, purple and green pallette. Will have to figure out how to get some lavenders without using white.. Did get a lot of nice greens going today though.

Some browns playing with the blue background.

This was some blues and oranges and browns on a yellow/orange fabric.

This was my favorite of the day. Like looking up through flowering trees to the bright blue Florida sky.

This was one of two prints that I got when there was basically no goo left -- maybe a 1/16 of an inch thick and I just picked up the edges of the plastic lining my tray to force some of the color from the bottom up to the top. I just love the effect of this and actually look forward to running out of the size. I have also found that I am getting really clean prints no matter how dirty the size as long as I change my rinse water very frequently.

My new process is to take the print, then squeeze lightly the fabric from the back to get out the excess size into one bucket. Then I rinse three or four times gently in the clean water and then hang to dry.

I am still not using any surfactant at all and am keeping pretty much with my Golden Fluid Acrylics which I LOVE. I have been using them with GAC900 which is the additive which is supposed to make the hand of the fabric softer. I think it has a mild surfactant in it. I slow the paints down by using some of my ProChem pigments which are very cheap and which mix very easily with the Golden paints (a cheap way to get all sorts of different colors). I have been using primarily the Golden Primary Cyan, Magenta and Yellow although I have also used the Pthalo Blue (Red and Green shades), Ultramarine Blue and Raw Sienna, Raw Umber and of course Titanium White (which I mix with my pigments). I am staying away from opaques except when I am printing on colored fabric where the graininess and fuzziness of the opaques is not so obvious. I have really not been using my Createx paints at all as I have are mostly opaques.

The fabric I have been using is the Joann's Egyptian cotton in white. It is really absorbent and works beautifully for marbling when I can find it!