Collage Fodder

It's school holidays for me and I'm having a blast with Fodder School play. The first lessons this month are from Tiffany Sharpe - she's on Instagram. We started by learning how to create florals and leaves in watercolour, with pen work and fussy cutting.

These were on watercolour paper. 

I then wanted to try using salt effects and different kinds of paper. I wasn't sure how well the printed papers would take the watercolour, so prepared some pieces with Absorbent Ground. 

You can see it's white but not totally obscuring the marks beneath. Below is the music page with salt applied in some areas of wet watercolour. 

I found that on the Ground the watercolour blended too much for me to get the effect that I could get on the watercolour paper for the flowers, but I was very happy with the hearts and leaves and could still use a wet-in-wet technique.

It also depends a bit on the paper. I don't like the flower on the Absorbant Ground in the bottom sample pictured above (although this will totally work once I add the pen work) but the samples above were on thicker paper without any Ground added and I love how they look. These are the experiments on various book papers and sheet music

I also had a second go on watercolour paper having fun with salt effects and dropping in extra colour while still wet.

I haven't used my watercolours in this way before and am delighted with the effects I achieved with colour blending

and salt

I also love hearts so made a few of those using different papers - you can see the salt effect quite well on the watercolour hearts

I will be adding stitch and probably words to these hearts when they are used later. 

There was also a bonus lesson on doodling shapes on painted papers. I had some suitable card stock already in my stash - made so long ago that I can't remember when! This first was stenciled

I discovered that by randomly drawing the outline of my leaves, I could then follow the lines of the print below for really cool random marks

These were my doodles before fussy cutting

They look so awesome once cut apart

EDIT : It looks like Fodder School ‘21-’22 sign ups are reopened! Not sure how long this will last so run over there straight away if you want in!

If you're interested in finding out a little more about Collage fodder, I posted HERE about the free Fodder Challenge now finished.

DeeDee Catron is keeping a record of where content from the original challenge can now be accessed. She said she'll update as teachers share in different places. Find that HERE.