Wordless Wednesday

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Autumn Colours

It's a very long time since I did any work with silk fibres, so I am pleased with the colours and texture that I managed to achieve on this bowl.  Leaves are staying on shrubs and trees so late this year that I still have these colours in my garden at the moment, but probably not for much longer.

Work in Progress

Skeleton leaves, gessoed and painted.

I came away from my last West Dean course with an absolute mountain of work in progress.  We were given so many new techniques to try that there just wasn't time to explore each one as much as any of us would have liked.  No matter, I've spent the weeks since happily playing with gesso, mod roc and spray plaster.
We stuck snippets of deconstructed fabrics on to board and gessoed over the top, we applied gesso directly on to the board and made marks in it, or embedded things in it, then we sprinkled stuff on the wet surface or let it dry and painted it with acrylics.

Partly sprinkled with sand and ash.

Our tutor had a great way of applying the paint in several washes with lots of sandpapering back after each one.  She also had some interesting warming up exercises, where we would be given an object and asked to sketch its essence. Weird, but fun!
I made a series of samples using crumpled up scrim, hessian with lots of threads pulled out and various plant parts.  Some are still waiting to be painted
Naturally, I soon wanted to get away from the flat surface of the board so I made a start on a vessel, using mod roc.

  I'm going to add some extra, scrunched up, bits to give it more texture and I've left some gaps in the plaster so that I can stitch into it after I take the balloon out.  It'll look good when its finished.  I just need to find a very sturdy needle.

In other news my first assignment for my present OU module was submitted yesterday and my story book went off to the printers today.  The publishers have produced files for Kindles too!

Sgraffito

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.

Studying!

This week is all about books.

I've now been allocated a tutor for my OU module so it's time to catch up with the reading.  This is my first level three course and I'm expecting the assignments to be more demanding and therefore more time consuming.  However, many of the set texts hold good memories for me so I'm looking forward to revisiting them.  I chose children's literature because, as some of you know, my own story for kiddies is being published later this year.  The illustrations are being completed right now by a talented Italian lady.

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My diploma course also has a written component.  It's not going to be all fun weekends, being creative and learning new techniques.  We have to bring our experiences together in a final essay so notes have to be made and other people's work referred to.  On the plus side, our student ID card allows us access to the beautiful old library at the college.  There are worse places to spend a few hours and if the effort of studying becomes too much the bar is just a few steps away.

Sunday Sunshine

My little patch of Rudbekia has been flowering for weeks now, giving sunshine even on the wettest days.  In fact quite a lot of yellow has crept into my garden this year, including the Argyranthemum that I've been using to practice colour mixing, for my sketch-book.

It's a plant I know as Jamaica Primrose and from new flower to faded bloom its petals pass through almost every shade of pale yellow and cream.  Quite a challenge to find the exact tone.  For me, acrylics are easier than watercolours.

I've decided that, in my newly acquired sketch book, 'drawings' should not be limited to pencil and paint.  (If I did that I'd never fill the beastly thing.) So I've been adding some 'fabric sketches' to the pages.  Continuing the theme of leaves and using odd scraps of organza, I've been playing with a different style of colour mixing.

 

  It's surprising how much the colours change when the fabrics are layered over each other.  I'm having fun with this and have not yet exhausted all the possibilities, so I'll probably be making a few more before I move on.

The 'paint and stitch on paper' that I mentioned last week is coming along quite well, but not yet ready to post.  I chose a lichen encrusted branch on my old quince tree as a suitable subject.

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.