I've been making a lot of these recently, and to be honest I'm not sure why, except that they are fun. When I started I had some idea of joining them all together, but I'm not sure I want to do that now, I rather like them just as they are. What do you think?
Anyway, to get back to the title of this blog-post ...
Friday was my most recent West Dean day and we were in the Orangery playing with the technique of sgraffito. If you are as old as I am you will remember the scratch art cards that we used to buy as kids where you scratch away the black layer on top to reveal the colours underneath. Our sgraffito day was a posh version of those cards, where we applied the colours of our choice using oil pastels and then covered the whole lot in black acrylic paint and left it to dry for a few minutes before scratching.
I made a lot of studys of leaves, flowers, twigs, feathers, etc, picked up in the West Dean gardens, but I think my favourite designs of the day are these few abstracts that I did late in the afternoon.
Next Friday I'm back to West Dean for a long weekend entitled 'Exciting Surfaces and Textures',which I believe will involve polyfilla, so I'm really looking forward to that.
Meanwhile I have an essay to write on the 'Constructions of Childhood' for the OU.
Beads! What a fine idea. And I like the sgraffito too. What did you use to scratch away the paint?
ReplyDeleteHi Iz, mostly I used a cocktail stick, but I also tried a feather and a craft knife.
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