"He Heard My Cry" (draft 2)

(image 1)

(image 2)

The title of my piece is now settled. It comes from Psalm 40: 1 .   I have yet to decide on the translation so I will post the verse in the final. There will be one more draft before the final, but you can see that I have added some old bible pages and plain rice paper. The handmade paper and old introductory page (1911) are simply laying on the top and their placement will be decided today.

If you like this process of laying down one sheet of marbled paper and then laying down text and rice paper overlays, be sure to have extra of this paper for some final touches. Fortunately, I bought (5) sheets of this particular pattern and colors. I may be adding some pieces of that on top of some of the rice papers at the end.

So what I am trying to do with this process is create an interesting pattern with the text, rice papers, and marbled paper. And just a side note about marbled papers...even when they are mass produced, each one is different and has to be hand pulled from the floating colors in the vat. So they are essentially handmade and created on archival papers which makes them a superior paper to use unless you want to use your own handmade mono prints or other papers.

This particular pattern and colors integrates extremely well with old text pages and handmade papers. I will be adjusting the values of the plain rice papers today by brushing on some soft pastels. This will create the darks that are needed and also reveal more of the overlapping edges.

Since yesterday, I adhered the full sheet of marbled paper to 300 lb. HP. I did this so that I have cropping options. You can adhere things directly to a gessobord, but you will live with your beginning layout. I then added one layer of text pages and plain rice papers....some of them overlapping. I then took a photograph before spraying with acrylic coating so you could see how opaque those rice papers are before they are sprayed. That's what you see in (image 1).

The next step was to add more rice papers...overlapping some of the first ones, but always revealing the edge of the first one laid down. I then found the introductory page to my bible and want to include it with my handmade paper, but they are not adhered yet. I want to add my soft pastels first and adjust some of the values.

So I have more decisions to make today (including cropping the image to an 11" x 14"). I am confident it will be a well designed piece because of my initial choices of materials. It will dramatically change before tomorrow. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.