Driftwood and an old tin

A page of my sketchbook. An old tin was sitting on my desk, open and filled with coloured inks. My favourite long driftwood stick and heavy round pebble were resting beside it. The bleedthrough of the colours from the other page, which matched the colours of the tin so exactly, was an accident and made me think of the blending together of objects, the relationship between the tree painted on the tin and the dry driftwood stick. The bleedthrough of the pen my sketch was drawn in drew a graphic shape on the next page that I wanted to play with.

I love the graphic shapes here, repeated with outlines blurred with water soluble crayons.

Next I drew the tin tree and the driftwood stick together as if one was thinking of another. I played with the two designs layered together, the driftwood and tree shape over the stick and stone design but felt it was too busy and its colours wrong somehow. So net I tried chopping out the pinkish driftwood shape. The muted colours of the photocopy I used and the white negative space left by the cut worked much better.

My favourite atttempt is this cut out shape formed by repeating the driftwood and tree shape and sticking the repeats down on a background. Before I coloured the shapes with crayons they looked very graphic. I was wanting to play with the idea of the stick shapes soaked int he colours of the tin but a different background paper would be more successful. I can imagine this forming the beginning of an appliqued cloth or a print.

Developing design ideas

This is a sketch of a twig and its shadow. My interest in line draws me so often to branches. I traced the negative shapes that I saw between the twig and its shadow and this drawing looked more like a long three dimensional object, a shell perhaps. I traced this shape several times, used water soluble crayons around the outlines and then ripped these shapes while still wet. You can see in the second image that I layered these repeat images to create a sweeping tassel-like picture. I prefer my next attempt which involved using the coloured edges left behind on the paper after I ripped out the wet shaapes. I layered and collaged these and used a black crayon to highlight some of the shapes. I like the way that the lines and shapes from my original sketch are still alive in this but also transformed into something softer. I think the colours work better. Altering the proportion of colour and white and neutral paper creates a more muted effect.

Developing sea kale images

This is my work for project 4 exercise 2. First my response to the picture ...next a a version in dry media. I think this one does capture the lantern like quality I was drawn to in the original image...

..this one is my favourite. It began as a disastrous attempt to use wet media (in this case acrylic paint) but I love it now that I've scratched into the layers of colour. I think the lines ,colours and shapes come together well here...

..finally a collage attempt. I layered painted paper, and tissue with lots of glue to try and capture the glossy textures. I wanted to move the shapes even more and layered them in all directions which I think is a little busy.

I am enjoying working in this way. I find the first steps into drawing very painful! Extracting
shapes and colours for design is a joy though.

I think the dry media image really captures the lantern - like quality of the bulbs that first drea me to the image.

Sea Kale

I am drawn to the luminous grey green colours and lamp-like shapes of these sea kale plants. I do always struggle to move beyond line to texture but in this case I found the texture of the plant particularly difficult to isolate. In the end I used black and white paint to create a smooth glossy texture and a grainy-below-the- surface texture.

French knot lichen

These are a few sketches and samples of my french knot piece. I was inspired by a photo of a branch I found on a walk covered in lichen. I loved its luminous colours and the shapes seemed to lend themselves to being rendered in french knots. I really enjoyed blending colours in a pointillist way by grandually adding new knot colours in layers. I loved stitching french knots with pieces of ripped fabric and chunky yarn, which it had never occurred to me to try before.

Revising and moving forward.

I am finding it hard to move forward as quickly as I would like on module 2. Drawing takes me way out of my comfort zone (and takes me hours) so I am finding my tiny child free spaces twice a week are taken up with lengthy and disheartening sketches. In addition this module seems very long! This fact and my slow progress through it means it has been a long time since I have had any feedback. I wanted to give myself the opportunity to find a way of benefitting from some communicaton and informal feedback as I go along. For this reason I am posting up a lot of my work from the last few months today. After my Pat's helpful feedback from module one I wanted to have another go at the final piece of stitching. She suggested giving myself the freedom to work more selectively with my sketches and photgraphs so I returned to my original drawings and the photo that inspired them and stitched another sample. I was very drawn to the swooping lines of the seaweed in the photo and my sketch reflects that. My original stitched piece in module one was very static I felt and so my revised stitching aimed to capture the dynamic lines from my drawing. Looking back at this attempt now I think it does successfully do that . I think the colours of the piece work well (I like the fabric background which I tea-dyed to match the colours of my sketch) and I think its lines have a liveliness which was absent in my original. However at the time I felt I was still trying to render the shape rather than delving deeper into texture so I sketches an enlarged section and used this as the basis for a more detailed stitched piece. I like the variety of stitching I achieved and the piece is more richly textured. However I think I lost the dynamism and spontanaity of the first and if I was to attempt this again I woud try to loosen the lines of the second stitched piece a little.