Sunday 1 July 2012

Project 6 , Stage 1 and 2- Collaging

Wool felt, polyester sheers and some sort of interweave stuff, based on drawings of new seasons garlic from the spring time in Aquitaine.
Top - layers of black cotton and white felt with holes cut into it and more shapes cut from a black sheer stuck on top, based on a sketch of tree bark in our park.
Bottom - Polyester sheer sandwich with trapped snippets, based on the colours of a pineapple painting.
Cotton collage based on a sketch from looking at Ernst Haeckls book of nature forms.
Collaged picture of African violets from Country Living magazine, using satin, polyester, interweave, hessian and velvet.

Stage 1 - Preparation

I did my best to follow the suggestion to lay out and organize my fabrics but living in a very small house with another adult and two children meant that the best I managed was taking it all out of my wardrobe and stacking it in piles in my living room, where at least I could see it every day!

Stage 2 - Developing Ideas

I've found it quite difficult so far in this course to work in my sketchbook in quite the right way.  I've felt that the drawing habits I've developed over the years aren't quite right for this kind of arts practice and I've struggled to get in to the swing of things, using my drawings as a jumping off point rather than a finished article.  Embarking on this project I decided that i would work with some completely new images to try and explore them in depth in the required manner.

I ended up really enjoying creating the above collages.  I very quickly began to see methods of recreating my images in fabric popping up all over the place, and  began to find the whole process pretty exciting.  I also realised near the beginning that these exercises were designed to lead on to applique projects and so some of them were created with this focus in mind.

It was most interesting to me to use different textures and weights of fabrics together and see how they worked in conjunction.  In particular \I really like the contrasts of using a heavy textured fabric, like a hessian, alongside a very light sheer.

Something that I didn't enjoy was trying to recreate exact matches for colours and shapes in the original drawing.  I prefer to work far more loosely and organically, but in retrospect I think I was trying to be too specific, getting hung up matching things too precisely instead of using the materials I had available to me in a more creative way to suggest the same sort of drawing rather than a copy of it.

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