Saturday, July 24, 2010

Birds - Seagulls - Journal Pages

Here are more pages in my Black Journal, these combining some of my photos with other sources (the birds on a wire and the 3 vertical birds aren't my own photos).

I used 3M Spray 77 to glue the photos to the black gessoed pages. I like this glue a lot for some purposes, especially for journal pages, though I isn't as permanent as I like for stand-alone collages. 

My setup for using this spray glue includes a large flat plastic bin with a lid, a magazine and the spray can. I lay my paper face down in the bin, take off my glasses and put them under something so no drop of glue touches the plastic lens (it doesn't want to come off once stuck to the glasses), and give the back of the image a quick spray. Working quickly, I lift it out of the box, close the lid, and put it in place in my journal. 

Why all the care? It's a SPRAY and it likes to float around the room, landing on all surfaces and leaving a tacky mess behind. By quickly closing the lid I allow very little spray to escape the box; it harmlessly coats the inside of the bin. When the magazine page gets too sticky I turn the page and have a fresh, non-tacky surface to lay my work on.

6 comments:

  1. Do be careful that the spray doesn't stick on important things like your lungs! Might want to look for a small fume hood or, we'd have to think of a more pleasant aesthetic, card board box in which to spray. Spray cement in an architecture lab at 3 in the morning is probably responsible for some oddness in my psyche.

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  2. I should have said that I hold my breath as I spray. Not that holding one’s breath is enough when the spray is going into the air I breathe. A BIG cardboard box in which to put my plastic spray box with holes in the side for my hands would be a good thing. But it would take up too much space, wouldn’t be immediate enough for my pace, and I’d have to paint the outside to make it beautiful. Sigh. Life is full of compromises.
    The other day at the art fair I gave a little lecture to an artist who was using Zylene to do solvent transfers... told him my neurologist husband said the zylene does permanent brain damage and Not. To. Use. Zylene. Wonder if he's switched to another product? Will I?

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  3. I am really loving your black and white journal Jo!!

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  4. Spraying in the plastic bin is a very practical idea. I love that picture of the tree on your journal page.

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  5. I love your bird and nest imagery-- one of my many collections are nests-- and you solved the tacky spray glue problem very well... I have used mat medium for so many years and have not experimented with anything else.

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  6. I really like these Jo. Very elegant.

    I bought a respirator from a hardware store. Its great. You don't breathe in a thing and no one sees you look like Adam Ant. Even when you spray in a box, which I bet you do in the garage?

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I appreciate comments and questions.