Drawing Skills: Pursuing frottage

I've been feeling quite without focus and getting worried about it. I contacted my tutor who pointed out what she thought was working well and artists who might inspire me. It was a very useful contact and as a result I've decided to look more closely at the idea of frottage.

Roger Miller is an artist who found frottage "makes the world easier to project meaning onto".
(1)

Frottage is about the organisation of chance elements.......causing the materials to interact in a cohesive fashion (1)

It's often hard to find where Miller's starting point is and I find the work very sinister but it appeals in a strange sort of way. Much of his work is coloured.

Helsinki Botanical Gardens - Roger Miller (2013) (1)

Miller's hero is the frottage artist Max Ernst (1891-1976). Ernst had a wide ranging artistic career that included frottage. He used natural and man made objects superimposed one on the other to create textural images.

The Fascinating Cypress - Max Ernst
(Histoire Naturelle) (2)

I like this image very much; it is clean and has lots of textural interest

I don't like working on white paper so I began by experimenting with spraying on some colour. First I used my sketchbook to practice. I used Procion fabric dyes well diluted because I wanted some subtle colour. I began with magenta and golden yellow because I wanted to capture my current garden colours.

I damped down half of my page and left the other half dry. The effect was slightly different but not markedly so, I sprayed my second colour again varying the dampness but there was little discernible difference.

Next I tried the same process on other sorts of paper. The water colour paper worked best because the colour settled attractively in the small depressions. Copy paper was OK but its whiteness shone through. Tissue and tracing paper were very much also ran.

As a comparison I spotted the page with concentrated magenta and golden yellow just to remind me how intense they can be. On the different papers I got different effects - some contained the spots and others allowed some spreading.

Playing with Procion on different papers at varying strengths

Next I took a large piece of lining paper and sprayed up as before, wet on wet. I laid some leaves on the page

and sprayed again with a more intense magenta.

I took the same leaves and did some rubbings on tissue paper with a 9B chunky graphite pencil. I cut them out quite roughly and glued them on to the paper slightly offset from the stencil shapes.

The colour of the tissue made a big difference to how the frottage looks and I prefer the subtlety of the cream. I sprayed with fixative so the graphite didn't smudge and in some places it took the colour from the tissue but not unattractively.

I wanted a bit more zing so I printed on some leaves using a light yellow acrylic paint.

What I learnt:

the initial stencil was a good starting point
it's not always the most obvious leaves that work best
colour has a place but the delicacy of the marks on the leaves looks best on white paper
the long fern didn't work well

What I'm going to try next: