Scrolling through Instagram a while ago, I saw a comment from Margaret Ryall that caught my eye. Somewhat in jest, she said that her work must include at least 5 steps. I felt seen! Not only does my work has multiple layers, and many steps to get to a finished piece, I relish the transitions and evolution of the work as it progresses.

Lately, I’ve been making more of my layers by hand, over multiple iterations, before even getting to the scanner, and the digital side of things. What are all those steps, and how do they come together? Well, this quote came to mind:

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.

Jasper Johns

Yup, that’s it! Both by hand, and on my computer, that’s exactly what I’m doing. But what are the possibilities? Let’s run through them, shall we?

Painting

It took me a while to circle back to painting, but these days, I’m exploring how to make it one of my first steps. Washes of acrylic paint or watercolour pigment make for some lovely scanned layers, not just starts. I can also drip alcohol for some nice colour removal, or sprinkle salt for texture.

After I scan, or not, I move to add something else: collage? Scribbles? Sure, often. Or…

Stitching

Of course, I can’t leave well enough alone. I found some embroidery thread, from a long-forgotten side project, and thought it might work as a response to the painting. It’s a connection with all the women in my family tree, but given my eyes, I wasn’t sure it was going to hold my interest — getting a needle through thick paper is tricky!

Once I had a few better tools (an awl, a needle-threader!) I created a few embellished landscapes from my painted pieces, and will keep it in mind when I’m wondering what step to try next.

Printing

Printing from a plate was one of my first classes when I added art back into my life. And a printmaking session is often on my mind as an intermediate layer, when I don’t like where the current piece is going. Using a form that has some different levels to it is a collagraph, and it doesn’t always take up the ink as I’d imagine. So I use it as a monotype, give it one pass with the ink, and see what I get. And, okay, after that, I get distracted by the next technique!

But from above, rather than my usual collage run through the press, this time I’ve got some stitching. What if that thread from the stitching left an impression if I inked it up as a print?

It certainly did — barely! I’ve got a little box of embroidery thread, and lots of pieces that need something more. This variation has lots to explore, maybe even enough to get me stabbing at paper with needles more.

Collage, Combined

I recently started working a bit larger. But then, from Louise Fletcher‘s quick Find Your Joy class, I took the simple idea of working big, then dividing up the pieces. Or — start with four smaller ones, combine them back together? It’s all good, and it was all fun!

Only I’ve alternated back & forth several times: I work smaller (9×12), then tape them together into an 18×24 piece, work big on that with large elements for a while, then separate the pieces, add more — something, anything — in a different orientation. You know how this goes: rinse & repeat!

Spackle

What do you call it when you’re fixing a hole in the wall? Polyfilla? Mud? That stuff! It scrapes on with a palette knife, and leaves a porous, matte texture. I think helping my grandfather prep walls for painting might have been my first exposure to a palette knife, and I still enjoy using it to create a smoothed surface, not just when I’m mixing paint colours.

But these days, it’s a coverup for art, and then a great surface to incise into, or paint over.

This piece, definitely still a work in progress, has had spackle as its most recent reinvention. It was a photographic layer, Skagit Homestead, used as a faint image in the larger work very small rocks, and printed onto wood for a show of those larger pieces. Just sitting at my studio, it suddenly became a new substrate for collage, paint, and now filler. Hmmm, what next?

Then What?

I’m still going to scan any results I like, and I’m still going to build digital compositions, dragging layers into my software, and tweaking them, then counting how many files I used. That’s what I add up for my finished pieces — but none of these manual evolutions is counted for that.

Multiple physical layers have a richness that I can’t easily simulate digitally. So, though I will try, with tricky options buried in Photoshop, I plan to also use all these physical options, and see where they lead me to get that rich sense of texture, decision-making, and history that I want all my pieces to have. And it will be that hard-to-define, still digital, but definitely hands-on, conundrum that suits me so well.