More Surface Design

 Next week we will be away at the beach and my FANE group meets the following week.  I've been kind of stalling on the next layer of the "renga" surface design round-robin we are doing because I just wasn't sure what to add to this fabric.  The person before me sketched in a landscape as you see above. I still think some members are getting confused about the exercise and are trying to add to a work of art with a focal point rather than simply experimenting with various surface design techniques.   After pondering how to continue, I decided I wanted to back away from the landscape direction, if possible, and try to add just a layer of design.  Since I already worked with acrylic paints twice so far, I figured I'd better try something else.

I bought myself a bunch of Shiva oil paint sticks several years ago because many artists in the group and in QA magazine were raving about them.  I like them, but I'm not totally wild about them for a few reasons.  They are kind of pricey, and to have any assortment of colors, you could spend a lot.  They also need time to cure, sometimes as much as a few weeks or even a month, so you have to plan that time into your project.  And every time you use them, you have to peel away a "skin" that forms over the crayon, which seems like such a waste of product.  But since I haven't used them in a while, I decided to break them out again and play around.  I found this book containing texture plates for making crayon rubbings that used to belong to one of the girls, so I flipped through it and chose a few textures that might work with the fabric.  I picked out three paintsticks, one dark green, one light green, and one turquoise metallic.

 I used three different textures: one on the upper portion of the fabric, one in the center, and another towards the bottom.  It still looks very much like a landscape, but at least the originator won't be completely forced to go in that direction if she doesn't want to.

I thought maybe my own surface design fabrics could use a little texture as well.  I added some of the dark green with a sort of petal-shaped texture plate to this fabric after I painted in some copper acrylic paint accents with a brush.

And I added some wavy lines with the turquoise metallic paintstick and another texture plate.  This fabric could probably use some more layers, as there are only two here, but I'll have to ponder that a little more.  I wonder what I'll create with all these new and unique fabrics...