Surface Design Redux

This is the piece I received for July in the Surface Design Round Robin hosted by the creative minds at "...And Then We Set It On Fire."

I held this one to the very end of the month (the time allotted) -- I was doing my stress-out thing because it has all this beautiful subtle color.  Initially, it was rust-dyed, then masked and painted with Setacolors.

I didn't think that my usual heavy-handed, in-your-face, gonzo approach to COLOR was appropriate here.  But what to do?  Again, this is not my fabric; it belongs to someone else and my usual approach to COLOR might not be appreciated.  Why not?  Well... ok.. not really sure why anybody wouldn't demand over-the-top color, but not everyone does.  Go figure.

 My first inclination was to add leaves and flowers.  I got out my hand-carved stampers and thought about it.  Hmmm.... then I got the bright idea of carving a new stamp -- a goldfish -- and doing a weeds in the water thing.  I thought I could mask off some of the greenish-yellow bars and stamp over them so it would look like fish hiding behind the weeds.  But then I didn't really like that idea for this -- I thought something more abstract would be better.  And I have the stacked triangle stamper and the curly cues.  Hmmmm...


I got out some of the sparkly Setacolors -- orange and lime green -- and mixed them with the lightning medium.  I used this because I was going for subtle (remember subtle?) and the color by itself is pretty intense. The lightning medium makes the color less intense without changing the viscosity of the paint --  very important when you're using stamps.    I didn't want runny paint.  I wanted nice clean images.

And here is the finished (for me, that is) piece on my design wall for today.  It's ready to send on to the next person.   Click on the photos for a closer view.

For more design walls, click here to go to Judy's blog.