Mixed media abstracts

After writing this up, I went blank when it came to the words for the accompanying social media posts. My other half suggested feeding the post to ChatGPT. He eventually stopped it trying to write a very cringe-inducing artist’s statement, but it got fixated on the twins: apparently, the stitches on these cards symbolise the special bond between the twins they were made for, which is not something that occurred to me as I was making it but, hey, I’ll take the symbolism.

I think there’s only been one card this year where I’ve started off with an idea of what I want to make for the person; instead I’ve picked a technique I want to try and start from there. And this pair of cards is no exception. I’ve seen various people create mixed media abstracts based on filling a space with simple shapes and thought that small versions could make a fun card design; with the added bonus that it would be straightforward to come up with a pair of “same but different” cards for the twins.

I made the two bases by trimming watercolour paper down to size using one of my We R Memory Keepers tear guide rulers, which gives a nice faux deckle edge. Most of the time when I’ve been doing mixed media I’ve focused on acrylic paints as the main medium. For a change, this time I started with watercolours. I picked two palettes — pink to yellow and pink to purple — and painted the shapes. Once they were completely dry I gently swiped over the top with a pale colour to unify it and avoid having a white background.

I added dots and lines to the shapes using paint pens and then joined the shapes with stitches drawn in with black fineliners. They definitely needed a spot of something shiny, so I added gilding to the dots on the largest round shape.

From the start I had wanted to added some thread to these designs. I stitched radiating lines in between the gilded dots and then added actual thread stitches to attach that shape to the surrounding shapes. On one of the cards I added French knots to the dots on the central shape. I had intended to do the same on the other one but I was working on them while waiting to go out — I ended up rushing to finish what I was doing and I’d stuck them both to their card bases before realising that I hadn’t actually finished the stitching. Ah well, no-one will notice!

I usually tape panels close to the edge when putting them on the card bases, but this time I kept the tape closer to the centre to allow the “deckle” edge to float slightly. In the spirit of “use what you have”, the sentiments were spares that I’d heat embossed ages ago — I finally found the card I used it on three years ago — I trimmed them down to size and stuck them to the card base with a square of foam tape to avoid gluing them to the abstracts.

And that was this year’s first card for a pair of twins. A couple of weeks later my nephew’s girlfriend had twin girls.