How it all started in the kitchen

I'm hosting a "kitchen" post card swap over at Mail Me Some Art.  The idea was to find something in your kitchen and use it to make a piece of art.

Here are some examples of what I made:

  

And since most of these marks were made with un-traditional tools, and since Lynn was asking me questions about backgrounds, I took some pictures of the stages along the way.

I started without a plan, as usual.  

The first thing I did was dip-dye some paper towels with diluted food coloring.  I folded up the towels in a variety of crazy ways (no fancy origami - just random folds) and dipped the corners in various colors.

When unfolded, it looks like this.

I made a bazillion.  And since they are two-ply paper towels, you pull them apart when dry and now you have two bazillion.

Then I took my new favorite mystery tool and stamped all over tissue paper.  

(Gina tells me this is a whisk and that her mother used it to beat eggs.  She wins the prize.  Maybe I'll send her scrambled eggs.)

And I took a cool patterned styro-foam meat tray and rolled paint on it with a brayer and stamped it on cheap printer paper.

THEN, I grabbed some 9"x12" sheets of water color paper, this awesome spatula, and my liquid watercolors (which I have poured into spray bottles) and made three layers using my spatula as a stencil.  I started with my lightest color, yellow, then switched to orange, then fuschia:

 same idea, different color palette:

 I gathered the various types of papers I'd made in similar color schemes:

 I grabbed the mod podge and started layering:

 and layering some more:

 and adding in some mesh vegetable bags in different colors:

 and finally, when all that was dry, I cut the page into four postcards:

 I decided they needed a little more embellishing.

I found this tube of weird stuff called "texture magic" that I'd found at the job lot store for a buck.  I think you're supposed to use it with stencils on your walls.  It's kind of thick, like toothpaste.

I squeezed it over the spatula and smooshed it into all the little holes with my fingers:

 This is what the finished cards look like (I also used blue dimensional stuff):

 I decided to add black accents to my orangey cards.  I like making marks with this silicone basting brush:

 More spatula stencil marks - this time using spray inks:

 This one was rapidly becoming a hot mess.  It's got a ridiculous amount of layers trying to compensate for the parts gone wrong.  I didn't have any orange dimensional paint, but I added some orange acrylic to some modeling paste and used a different (non-kitchen-related) stencil with that.

This was not my most popular theme over at MMSA, but clearly, as the picker of the themes, this is one I adore.  I love the challenge that comes with making art with non-art materials.

You can see some other great examples of kitchen art from the swap here and here