Distressing a magazine image with acetone - Demonstration

so sometimes we quite often we use magazines to find images and incorporate them in a collage or a mixed media work so the way to do a magazine search is really not to have any idea in your mind about what you're looking for but just to be open whenever you see something that attracts you you just stop in your tracks and you take out the page so try not to be distracted by the the words and the images the context and try and see things in a more abstract way just being attracted by color or texture or shape or just the feeling of an image so that swan that is about to fly might be something that just triggers something a response in you a gut response so you you would take the page and tear it out put it to one side not even knowing whether you're going to use that swan um at the end of the day so you just carry on doing that and turning the pages until you get somewhere so let's say i've i got here and this little bird is quite quite amazing with its beak open singing it's springtime so i'm going to tear that out so i can do that or i can take the back of open the scissors and just score the page which helps to tear it up more easily famous last words so i've got this image now but it's quite shiny and glossy and it does look like an image from a magazine so first of all i'm going to tear off the white edges and i find that a torn edge like this is much easier to to integrate with the hand work that you're going to use as well just get rid of all the bits that you don't want that somehow interrupts the the image so here we are there's the little bird now before i incorporate it or stick it into the collage and i might want to distress the image a little bit so that it's not quite as shiny and glossy and perfect so it's a good idea with this a bottle of acetone you need a rag or an earbud or both and here i have various textured objects that can do wonderful things so let me wet the rag just do that and we can also dip the earbud in here put the lid back on because it evaporates very very quickly so the earbud allows you to be very precise and almost draw along a specific line and lighten it so if i wanted the twig to show up more clearly against that little feather there i would do that and just bring it to a lighter shade so now this little piece of feathers shows up a bit more clearly i can do a little bit there and you could even draw with it if you wanted to um you can actually draw someone's eye maybe looking at the little bird um so you you can see how you don't have a lot of control which is wonderful and because then you just give up and just um go with whatever lands on the page which is rather liberating um so the other thing that you can do is to put something with a bit of texture underneath so there's this leaf here which has been dried and it's got a very nice texture to it and if you put it underneath and you hold it steady so it doesn't skid around and you rub now with the the rag dipped in acetone you can see how the veins of the leaf are imprinted on the on the image which immediately lifts this image from that pristine kind of perfection of a glossy magazine image to something a little bit different so you can overlap these and bring in a different texture with it over it and really have fun with that so the the cloth does evaporate quite quickly and then maybe spread a little bit more elsewhere and then you could just carry on and just really play with this this i want to plan it so that it creates a little singing halo here so so there's the little bird and now its song is actually also indicated by the texture that the rubbing created so this is now a piece that i can include in a collage that has already got some marks of an intervention that feels easier to integrate so if i were to want to stick this down on a piece of paper i would let's say i stuck it down here i would take the glue and spread it quite carefully so that it it doesn't have any bubbles so i would really do this quite pedantically make sure you go right up to the edges so i'm just doing a little bit now to show you i'm just going to stick that right on the edge here so you can see what is going to happen afterwards so now there's a big jump between the color of the magazine image and the white of the page and that's when now you can come in with your dies and your coffee and things and start trying to make the transition a little bit less obvious but even when you do this you'll find oh it still shows quite a bit so let me put a little bit of a darker color in here and things will start happening and spreading and that's what you want to do you want to just allow things to just get a life of their own this might be a little bit too much so i can just do that and immediately i wasn't planning to do this but this is like a new effect that hey that's quite nice but what you can do now if this were dry which it isn't you could take your pastels your oil pastels and use them because they're going to stick on them on the glossy magazine image you can use these to to create a transition um so that you can't tell at the end of the day where which part is magazine and which part is um sort of hand work so you can put a wash over this as well to see what happens so now i'm getting an interesting page which is beginning to have its own life and interest and of course when this dries you will be able to go back again and work on it and put other marks in and so on and so forth so in the end you won't be able to see where one thing starts and the other ends so you get the idea

Channel: The Artery

Views: 3,107

Rating: 4.9006209 out of 5

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Id: I1chiMnzd1I

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020