Cobwebs

I tracked down the artist who wrote about the cobweb technique in "International Artist". Her name is Mary Ann Beckwith and you can read a little about her here. Mary uses hot pressed watercolour paper and Yupo (a plastic watercolour paper) with the cobweb and liquid watercolour for the pigment. As I was reminded with my experiment yesterday, inks can cause the cobweb to stick to the surface and leave fibres behind.

This is a detail of my piece. When using inks the colour does not fade on drying as it would with watercolour so this is quite vibrant. I did make the mistake of dropping inks onto the paper before applying the cobweb and the overall effect is too dark and even for my liking. I will have another go and

1 Stretch the cobweb out so it is finer

2 Hold the web down with drawing pins (pushpins)

3 Spray the web and paper with water and let it soak into the fibres before I apply the inks.

I am wondering whether this technique would work with tissue, lutradur, scrim or calico so I will be having another play this week. I've just bought some silk paints so I may use these instead of the inks. Once you have your cobwebbed paper (or fabric) you can of course use it as a background or however the fancy takes you.

I've been working on making my fibre paper (from the Fibre & Stitch challenge) into a book cover today and have now got all the stitching to do so I'll show that later if I can get a needle through all the layers!

Hope everybody's having a good weekend!