Saturday, August 21, 2010

New way of using lace

I love lace, and I'm always trying to find ways to put interesting texture detail into pictures. One way would be to scan the lace into my computer and apply its texture to pictures digitally, but I don't like that idea because I always want a picture to be complete physically. Everything that's going to be part of that picture, I want it to be part of the picture in real life, not only after I've turned it into a computer file.

Also, working with real things gives you more options. It always gives you more colors, of course, since computer monitors can only show a certain number of colors while pigment combinations can show the entire visible spectrum. (in the scanned version of the picture those colors are taken away, but still) But it also means there are more ways you can use something like lace. If I scanned it in, then I could put it in a picture with several different colors and opacities, but it would always be the same arrangement of light to dark ratios. But with real lace, I can do many things, each yielding and entirely different sort of texture. I can right-out paste it on; or I can coat it in printer's ink and use it as a stamp with a brayer; or I can airbrush over it as I've frequently done; or now I've found I can partially paint it with acrylic, lay it on the paper, paint over the whole thing with ink and a lot of water, then remove the lace and get something like this:

As usual when I first try out a new technique, I'm going to do fanart on this piece, But this is definitely a method I'll be using again.

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