I am fascinated with the effects of pressure on things: cracks in surfaces are a source of endless inspiration to me. I will often return from my travels with bizarre images of street surfaces and the sides of buildings. I think this is the legacy of having an architect/structural engineer father. How things fit next to one another (think piles of stones) is another obsession. But, I digress.
I tried and tried to get potato dextrin (potato starch) to play nice, but I never could achieve the desired results. Enter the humble sack of flour.
Flour is cheap, accessible, and a wonderful surface design tool for the textile artist! The results can vary depending on the thickness of the flour to water mixture. For the following tutorial I mixed the flour paste to resemble thin-ish pancake batter.
The cloth I will illustrate is part of a round robin exchange. The color was a bit muted for my personal taste, but a bigger concern to me was that the imagery on the cloth was of only one scale, and not really interconnected throughout the piece. While not completely unattractive, it just didn't excite my imagination.