Hitting the wall.........

It has been a busy year. We came back from our Christmas trip last year in the knowledge that expat life was about to end and that we were lucky enough to be coming home to the UK. Something like our 6th move in 11 years. It took two months for our main shipment to arrive (including all my art materials and fabrics).

We settled into our house, just the two of us only to find our son descend on us from Uni for the summer. Then our daughter came home in October, bringing with her our beautiful grand-daughter, after the breakdown of her relationship. So here was my favourite little person in the house to play with and my textiles sat untouched in my studio (that's the conservatory to everyone else). Then with the colder weather it was too cold to work in there, it had a heater but who on earth can afford to heat a conservatory all day at the moment? Thankfully my lovely husband worked on a Saturday to move all the dining room furniture into the conservatory and all my materials into the dining room.

Enough procrastination yet? No, I had Christmas cards to make. If I had put as much effort into my painting and printing on fabric section as I had those cards, I'd have been onto the manipulating fabric section back in June.

I feel incredibly disappointed in myself. I was actually firing on all cylinders and doing very well I thought. But if I look back at the past 9 months with a fresh eye, I have actually done very little. What did I think I had achieved? And was I pleased with how I had achieved it? In a word, no. I think I thought that I could simply wander through the coursework, picking it up when the mood took me, when I now know that I should have been eating, drinking and sleeping Textiles.

Although I can see that I've done quite a few physical pieces, my sketchbook has been left seriously wanting,  I haven't been particularly vigilant about research either. I'm determined to fix this. I have made the decision to go back to the beginning of the painting and printing on fabric section and work through it, adding and expanding on what I have done already. Obviously Christmas is about to hit and so this next few weeks is going to be busy. I'm not procrastinating! I'll be working on my sketchbook. The sketchbook has been a major stumbling block for me. I have only really sketched to set out some basic designs for my textile projects. I know that I need to fill those sketchbooks with all sorts of things, ideas, fabrics, papers, photos. I bought Kay Greenlees' book 'Creating Sketchbooks for Embroiderers & Textile Artists' back in June and it has been inspirational. Now I just need to pull the proverbial finger out and get down to some hard work.

I'm going to try to sketch something each day for the next couple of weeks and will be putting the results either here or on my tumblr.

Wish me luck!!

Project 5 - Painting and Printing on Fabric - Silk Painting

Let me first start by saying that I have NEVER painted on silk before. I didn't even realise that I needed a frame to hold the silk taut. It has just been something that has never appealed to me, mainly because my only experience of painted silk had been garish scarves covered with bright flowers. Once you put 'silk painting' into Google, you will see plenty of that, however you will also see some amazing images created by very talented artists. It opened my eyes to what is achievable with silk paints.

I'm still going with the honeycomb pattern as I like how it has developed since those early sketches. When I used the watercolours to create the initial image, the small cells started to look like very strange landscapes as seen from the inside as opposed to the original context of cells filled with larvae or honey. I wanted to build upon this with the silk painting as I knew that the qualities that the paints had, would give another level entirely.

The first attempt was quite good in my opinion, it was really just about using the materials and getting used to how they worked in my hand. I realised that in places, I hadn't used the gutta effectively and that the colour started to bleed.

The salt that is intended for silk painting use, didn't give me the effect I really wanted for this piece. It was far more grainy than coarse sea salt for example. I made the cells quite big and the 'alien' landscape that I was trying to convey actually looked more like the original drawings.

For my next attempt, I was a lot more patient. I allowed the gutta to dry overnight rather than attempting to paint when it was still damp. I also took a lot more time placing the grains of salt to make sure that it wasn't just a haphazard sprinkle.

Initially, the hexagon outlines were in a very pale yellow similar to the one used in the first attempt. however when I had finished the cells, I felt that they needed to be lifted more. So I used a brown and black mix of paint which I feel, framed the cells and gave the image more of a 3D effect. 

This is definitely a medium I can see myself using in future work, I like the way the paints work together but I know I will need a lot more practice. Hence the the dark cell, as that is what happens when you are careless and drip where you don't want to!

A visit to Aberdeen Art Gallery.

One of my favourite artists of all time, is Annie Lennox. From her days with the Tourists (I know, I'm showing my age now) through The Eurythmics and then as a solo artist, her music and style has always held a great appeal for me. So when I heard that a collection of her costumes from videos, tours and album covers was going to be on display at Aberdeen Art Gallery this summer, I was very excited.

It was great but a massive drawback for me was that photography was not allowed in the exhibition itself and I had really wanted to write about it and include lots of photos. There was a guide book but it was thin and didn't include many images. Thankfully, Aberdeen Art Gallery is much more than that one exhibition and I was surprised at just how much there was there.

One of the first things that really caught my eye was a sculpture by Kenny Hunter - a Scottish artist - titled 'Feedback Loop' - it is stunning. I'm not entirely sure why I liked this so much. It has an almost cartoonlike look, akin to the type of characters you would see in Japanese computer games. I know that it is of a Japanese girl from the streets of Harajuku but the holding of the pink flowers (the only colour other than grey in the sculpture) made me think of Tiananmen Square, of youth and hope standing strong and proud but slightly coyed by the situation. I love this sculpture and I want it in my living room. Isn't this the feeling that art is supposed to convey?

Highly Sprung by Julia Douglas is a completely different piece of art entirely. It is a dress made from the small metal springs from clothing pegs and surrounded by a circle of the wooden pegs. The scary thing is that I didn't even realise that this is what the dress was made of. I was staring at the hem of the dress and how it flowed onto the floor when my husband pointed out what it was made of. I love the flow of it. I especially like the rusted element to the hem.

There is a section of the gallery devoted to samplers, costume and Applied Art - which has more than 1500 items, covering all aspects of applied and decorative art, design and craft, costume and textiles.

One of the samplers was by an Ann Stopforth, aged 12 years in 1822. It's very interesting to look at something that was made with great care and attention that has been kept so long and passed through many hands and that it is still in such good condition.

Another standout piece for me was a statue of mother and child called A Thank Offering by Benno Schotz (1891 - 1984). It cries out to be touched. I'm not sure if the photos do it justice but there is the grain of the stone running all the way through it, layers and layers that he has worked on - almost as though the sculpture is ring upon ring of stone and not sculpted.

Aberdeen Art Gallery has many pieces of work by many artists, including Degas, Moore, Turner, Hirst and many lesser known artists and sculptors. It was delightful to find so many new (well, new to me) artists and I will definitely be going back. It may not be on such a grand scale as the National in Edinburgh but it has so many wonderful works of art and it is impossible to appreciate them all in one morning.

Planning for my silk painting attempt using watercolours

I'm waiting on some silk gutta and a frame to be delivered so I thought I'd try my honeycomb and bee out in watercolours to see how that would look. I tried to use similar techniques that I will be using in the silk painting experiments i.e salt to leech colour and using the paint on wet paper. I also used the lino cut of the bee, painted with watercolour to give a brief outline that I could work with.

I'm really pleased with the end result and I'm looking forward to trying this in silk painting.

Project 5 - Printing and Painting on fabric

As a repeatable pattern, I felt that the honeycomb would be easier to achieve - but only as a stepping stone to giving me the confidence and abilities to use more complicated images. However it was actually more challenging than I thought it would be.

I will be trying to fine tune the pattern today - turning it into a repeatable pattern, using a program very similar to Illustrator.

I spent Saturday afternoon carving a print of the honeybee from the original sketch. This was intended as a print cut to break up the honeycomb pattern in places. It printed very differently on paper using printer's ink, a much heavier and intense image, even when there was less ink on the block.

Using a very thin fabric with a satin sheen to it produced a much lighter print of the bee, giving it more texture. If you look at the black stripes, you can see a slightly 'hairy' effect which was not part of the block cut, unlike the cross hatching on the thorax. This was not evident on the paper print but seemed to be entirely a side effect of the fabric paint on the sheen.

Printing and Painting on fabric - fabric

I decided to take a break from the honeycomb pattern, turning again to my sketches of the horse's skull from our visit to Provost Skene's House in Aberdeen. I'm not sure why but the image has really stuck with me and I wanted to see if I could recreate it in lino cut and print.

I'm now using a speedy carve material for my printing. It's a lot easier to cut into although it is easier to make mistakes as well!

black ink on white paper

white fabric paint on black cotton

I am really pleased with how this has transferred onto the fabric. I like how it has changed from being a simple cross section of one of my sketches to a different object altogether. At one point I saw a caterpillar on a leaf and another time, I was thinking of a spine and muscle around the vertebrae. It isn't an image that seems to transfer as a repetitive image but I'm going to be experimenting with that tomorrow.

Project 5 - Printing & Painting on fabric

It's been a long time since I've done any kind of printing and I think that was with a potato when I was in Primary school or with one of those little printing sets I got one Christmas.

I decided to go with one of the sketches I have done from the honeycomb set, this was one of the earliest sketches I did and I was actually very pleased with the way that the bee turned out.

I chose to focus on the honeycomb that you can see I coloured in. The next step for me was to choose a printing material that I would feel comfortable with. I have never tried lino block cutting before and it took several attempts to get an image that I thought looked anything like the honeycomb. I found the traditional lino block very difficult to use and tried using a much softer type of lino cut. This had a definite advantage in that I didn't have to exert too much pressure on the cutter to get the shape or lines although I had to be careful not to mark any of the areas that I wanted to keep in the print, as the softness of the lino would definitely have been affected. I'm also printing these on paper with printing ink to get an idea of what they look like before I take the step of printing onto fabric.

I was disappointed that some of the lines in the outer segments weren't raised enough to leave a print so decided to try again.

As you can see, I tried repeating the pattern. I'm going to have a couple more attempts at the lino cut before I make a decision which one to try on fabric although I actually prefer the second one, above. 

Looking for Shapes & Drawing

Whilst I was reviewing some of my sketch and photo resources for the next stage - 'Developing Design Ideas' - I realised that I actually have very little in the way of sketches. I had been trying to make more of a conscious effort to draw but I know I set my own standards too high. I either want it to be a perfect representation of what I'm trying to draw or it's not good enough to show anyone or use. Again, I've been making a conscious effort to change that aspect of my approach as well.

Recently we went to the Embellished exhibition at Provost Skene's House in Aberdeen and I took quite a few photos of objects that were not in the exhibition itself, including one of a horses skull. I'm not sure why this particular object interested me and if I'm honest I don't think I even intended to ever use it, however when I was trying to decide what to sketch next, this was the one I chose.

Then I chose a section of the image using the viewing frame.

Oil Pastels

Watercolours

Watercolour close-up

I definitely feel more confident about my sketching now whether I think it's good enough or not. I am very much looking forward to developing my design ideas as prints or sewn projects.

The Embellished exhibition at Provost Skene House, Aberdeen

We went along to an exhibition in Aberdeen a few weeks ago at Provost Skene's House, titled Embellished , it featured embroidered garments and accessories from their permanent collection. It was quite a small collection but there were some beautiful items including a wool Victorian walking suit with a Russian style braiding - see below.


Unfortunately, the lighting was an obstacle to getting very good images with my camera. 


You can see how the embroidery along the bottom of the skirt is very different in style and quality to the braiding on the cape and it is very possible that the braiding was a later addition.

One of my favourite pieces in the exhibition was the pink beaded 'Flapper' dress from around 1923-1924. I'm not sure if the photograph is of a high enough quality for you to be able to see the tiny glass beads that cover the entire dress and the decorative bands of bugle beads clustered at the right hip that sweep up towards the shoulder and waistline.

 I can only imagine what this must have looked like under the lights with all the tiny sparkles from the glass beads as the wearer maybe danced the Charleston or the Shimmy.

The blue dance dress (late 1950s) is a far more structured outfit, with a skirt made up of gored panels with inset fishtail sections, this added a fullness to the skirt, giving a very dramatic effect when dancing. The floral embroidery and Tambour work is enhanced with sequins and diamante stones.

Whilst it was a very small exhibition, it really helped me being able to see some of this work up close instead of just browsing the internet or pouring over the books. It wasn't just about the clothes as Provost Skene house has a lot of very interesting displays including recreated rooms with original artifacts.

In one room, there was a wooden four poster bed with a very pretty embroidered coverlet.

It wasn't just in the obvious textiles that took my interest, once I started looking around, even the ceilings, windows and flooring were photographed with a view to using them at a later stage.

Next exhibition for us will be the 'House of Annie Lennox' which I can't wait for.

Project 4 Stage 2 - Looking for shapes and drawing

Exercise 2

Exercise 3

Project 4 Stage 2 - Looking for Shapes and Drawing

Exercise 1

"Take the image you most enjoyed working with from your viewing frame. Make 3 quick drawings, to set down different aspects of the marked off area"