Saturday, October 2, 2010

Book Study - Watercolor on Baby Wipes

We are studying Bernie Berlin's book "Artist Trading Card Workshop". This week is the section "Watercolor on Baby Wipes". The instructions are tow set a clean baby wipe on a piece of scrap paper and then set on a piece of palette paper and randomly squirt liquid watercolor over the wipe. I don't have liquid watercolors, so I decided to use dye re-inkers and dropped ink over the wipe.
The dye re-inkers didn't blend well, so I added some water to help the ink spread, I went a little overboard. Bernie suggests setting the wipe and the scrap paper aside to dry.
The colors blended more than I wanted, but I love how the ink helps the patern of the wipe stand out (and the color is great). This can now be applied to an ATC or other paper to use as a background.
I had a scrap paper that had gesso over a stencil from another project. I like how it looks after absorbing the ink under the wipe.
Because my wipe was so wet, and I was a bit impatient for it to dry, I set the wipe between two sheets of printer paper and pressed to absorb some of the ink, and repeated several times. Now I have lots of papers to play with.
I did this technique again, without adding the extra water.
Wipe after it dried:
Some printer paper was used to absorb the excess ink:
Bernie mentions that you can also fold the baby wipe in half before adding the watercolors and later unfold to achieve a Rorschach inkblot test. I recommend Bernie's book, to see how the technique looks with the watercolor and see it used in ATCs.

2 comments:

Rosie Rowe said...

Another fab post Carol! Interesting results aswell - you shouldn't run out of background papers for a while!! =)

chrissy said...

Thanks for experimenting with this technique... I like how your wipes turned out.
Chrissy