Texture and Thermography

So remember when I got all excited about my embossing powders and was proud of my spider and butterfly? I then did up a bunch of sketches that sat there collecting dust while I ran around town trying to convince people to vote for me. Now that the election is over, I have spent the last week and a half turning them into what they were supposed to be. Also, despite the fact that the embossing powders themselves think they are embossing, it is really a totally different process. Apparently printing with powders is called thermography. Who knew? I am learning all the time, and now have more research to do–because these are fun to play with!

I started by making companion pieces to the two I had already done. Because if you do a pair then it is deliberate, not a random experiment, right? Exactly.

Here they are:

The thing about doing the butterflies like this, is that it really focuses on the huge amount of variation. So then I got excited and decided to do a series based on my butterfly collection, taking out the color and highlighting the shapes and the patterns. Apparently I really am a bug person, because I am SO excited by these! Each is about 5×5 on a 9×9 piece of paper with lots of petal and plant bit inclusions. Framed the same and hung together like this, really does make those variations stand out, doesn’t it? I am so pleased with how they turned out! Of course if I had sensibly done just ink drawings, or paint outlines, these would have all been very simple and fast to do. However, why do it the easy way when there is a more complex and time consuming process available? I am in love with the texture that thermography provides, and you don’t get that with a simple ink or paint sketch.

Here they all are individually, because then you can at least see a little bit of the texture and the inclusions in the scans.