Sunday, March 6, 2011

Bahamian Rhapsody

A few weeks ago, I had a delightful mid-winter escape to Andros Island in the Bahamas. It was my first visit and I was amazed at how few people were on Andros, compared with the bustle of the Nassau area. Andros is the largest but one of the least populated island in the Bahamas. There were days when I walked for an hour on an expanse of beautiful tropical beach and never saw another soul.

While there, I was adopted by lovely residents of the area where we were staying. One of our adventures was a trip to a local batik factory in Fresh Creek called Androsia. http://www.androsia.com/ I was so enthralled watching the batik process that we arranged to go back and take a class there. This 'factory' was a big warehouse-type building surrounded by scrub vegetation, where 20 yards of freshly batiked fabric hung next to someone's laundry.

One man who works there has over many years created the most wonderful stamps for making the fabric by developing his own stamping method. He designs and cuts a stamp out of heavy foam rubber and mounts it on a wire frame. The stamp is then dipped into the hot wax and printed onto the long lengths of white cotton fabric. Once it's all stamped, the fabric is dyed in old bathtubs. Then the wax is removed and the fabric hung out to dry. The ladies at the factory make wonderful clothing out of the fabric or you can buy it by the yard and bring it home to make your own.

In our batik lesson, we were given a practice strip and then one yard of fabric on which to make our own Bahamian inspired designs. We were given stamps to use and also a 'tjanting' pen, with which we could write or draw our own pictures. This turned out to be much more difficult than it looked in the demonstration! The ladies I was with then let me choose a color for all our pieces to be dyed, and I chose "Turtle Green", which was as close as I could find to the color of that beautiful Caribbean water.

As a thank you to my kind hosts, I came home and used some of my fabric to make bags, which I will send back to them to remind them of the fun we had one steamy day in the beautiful tropical paradise that is Andros.

Scratching a New Itch


In my constant quest to fight creative boredom, I tried some scratchboard. Instead of planning a design, I sat down with a nice piece of black board and a scratching tool and just started scratching whatever came into my head (as usual, it had to do with food!). There's something much less intimidating about a plain black surface than a plain white page. I also discovered that if you do happen to scratch too much, you can always dab a little black india ink on the spot and scratch again. Once it was all scratched, I used a little watercolor to add the finishing touches.
This piece was really just an experiment but I'm still rather proud of the result. It inspired me to think about illustrating a book or writing my own Zine. I'll explore those ideas more after I go get something to eat!