Day Two

While Saturday had been mostly black ink and charcoal, Sunday was all about colour.

We were given a selection of leaves, some naturally variegated and some beginning to show autumn colour and five tubes of paint, two yellow, two red and one blue.  The idea was first to sketch the leaves as accurately as possible and then to mix colours for painting our sketches without obscuring our drawn lines.

I cannot draw, I've never been able to draw, but my sense of colour is quite good so I did enjoy mixing the acrylic paints and keeping them transparent enough for my sketched lines to show through.

Next we did some collage work, quick responses to specific words, using only two colours of paper.

After lunch we were into the third dimension!  We were each issued with a lump of clay and asked to make sculptural responses to words generated by our tutor.  This was working against the clock and entirely on instinct as we were given only three or four minutes to complete each piece.  This, to me, was huge fun!  Sadly though, as we were working so quickly and the same clay was continually reused, there was no time to record the pieces I made.
Our final mini sculptural challenge was to represent how we were feeling right at that moment.  I made two pieces, one entitled 'Tired' and the other one 'Battered'.  This resulted in much group laughter and a commendation from the tutor for my honesty! 

Looking back I'm astonished at how much the tutors managed to fit in to our first weekend.  We now have a few days to write up our notes, sort out our heads and have a go at a few of the ideas that we have buzzing around.  I want to try a combination of paint and stitch on paper, maybe representing lichen on a branch or something similar.

Day One

All weekends at West Dean start on a Friday evening, with a meal, a chance to meet fellow students and a bit of preparation for the following morning's practical session.
The emphasis over the whole of the introductory weekend was very definitely on drawing.  Not my strong point, but I had fun trying to improve!  Saturday morning found us out in the grounds searching for bits of shrubbery to use as tools for drawing trees.  We'd been issued with black ink and a what I considered to be an unnecessarily large sheet of paper.

First choose your tree.

Some people drew a whole tree, or even a group of trees.  Others went for a more detailed approach, a particular branch or an interesting part of the trunk.  I decided on a couple of branches of a yew tree that were hanging over a laurel bush.  The branches were making attractive shapes and I found that the pointed end of a laurel leaf makes a surprisingly good 'nib' for drawing spikey yew leaves in black ink.

After lunch we were sent into one of the courtyards of the college to draw shadows.  This time we were armed with charcoal and another oversized sheet of paper.

The idea was to lay the paper on the ground and draw round the shadows that fell on the paper.  Then move to another area with different shadows and add them to our paper.  Then move again, so that we built up layers of shadows, some faint, some dark, some lacy, some bold and straight, all being cast over each other.  The finished drawing was full of interesting negative shapes and great fun to do.  Although my poor old knees were wishing I hadn't crawled quite so far under that middle bush! 

Fitted around these two major projects were smaller ones involving splashing lots of paint about, in response to some carefully structured words, working as a group to make a huge paper sculpture and using mixed media materials to give our individual interpretations of what it means to live a creative life.

Sunny Sunday



Grevillia



Globularia



Soldanella



Sitting in my garden, soaking up the sun and recovering from another week at West Dean.

This time it was a really intense, full week course of Creative Development.  A Textile Workshop with two tutors, one a tapestry weaver and one an experimental embroiderer. The idea was to integrate aspects of the work of both tutors.  I've never tried any sort of weaving before so the learning curve was steep.

We had four days of uninterupted studio time - incredibly concentrated work, but hugely enjoyable.  An opportunity to experiment and debate.  I came away with two 'works in progress' which I'm keen to continue with as they are both looking at ways of adding my hand stitching to an assemblage of warps and wefts. 

Experimental Hand Embroidery

James Hunting's stunning embroidery.

Three days have rarely flown by so quickly as they did this week, on a hand embroidery course tutored by the immensely talented James Hunting.  Regular visitors to this blog will know my own work is small and detailed, but James takes delicate to a whole new level.  His stunningly beautiful flowers are worked in single strands of embroidery threads, either stranded cottons or silks.
His teaching covered all the basics of linear stitches, blanket stitches and couching, through a few modified stitches to french knots and raised stitching.  We worked mostly on linen and organdie.  James proved to be a very patient mentor. 
The embroidery I have chosen to show is unusual in that it is beaded and doesn't feature the piecing together of different linens which usually forms part of his larger work.