Textiles Week

We started Textiles week by doing some warm up drawings in our sketch books; similar to the ones we did in Illustration. Then we moved this onto a larger scale out of our books like we did in Illustration. However, this time we used old pieces of envelopes as the base and we used a range of coloured inks, pastels, oil pastels, collage, masking tape and pencil. We had two still lives set up for us; one with bright coloured fabric and wooden, painted toys and the other had more organic objects such as skulls and dried plants with more earthy coloured fabric. The emphasise was on looking at shape, composition and colour rather than focusing on the actual, individual objects themselves. We kept changing the position of the paper (upside down, sideways etc.) so that our pieces didn't become too detailed and tight. I really liked the way all the pieces turned out and I'm really pleased that they were all quite different - one focused on colours, the other on line and the last on shape.

line

colour

shape

In the afternoon we did some mono-printing. I loved doing this! I really liked the effect of drawing with  a continuous line and in my left hand - I love the quality and looseness of the line especially as I'd chosen elements from the wooden toy still life for my mono-prints so I wanted something that felt quite young and playful - so I used this technique for my mono-prints. I really like how each print is unique - I think there's something really lovely about that. I like my three bird prints because I think they're really simple but they're really easy to look at; they're pretty and uncomplicated which can be a really nice escape from all the angst you get in art sometimes. I quite like the two fish heads print; although I am a bit disappointed with the orange background; that was supposed to be more subtle but I added too much ink on the board. I'm quite glad I made this mistake because it taught me to be really careful about how much ink I should use and it made me realise that when mono-printing you can't control exactly what your work is going to look like. Which is, in some ways, is really exciting and fun for you as an artist but can also make you feel quite nervous about adding to work that you like as they are although but you still need to continue with. I don't feel that the other two pieces were as successful. I don't like the composition of the piece with a bird and a fish on it; I think it looks a bit messy and not well thought out, and I don't think the colours sit right together. I don't like the orange and blue together on the last one either. Although I do like how bold and different it is to the others but there's just something about it that doesn't work for me.    

The next day we had to use inspiration from the shapes/ colours/ lines/ composition from the previous day's work to create two banners. However, during this session we had to include fabric and stitching. I really liked the pinks, vivid blues and dull yellows in one of my pieces but I liked the lines and shapes of the birds so I decided to combine these two elements in my banners. I love the colours together on the banner and I think the background works really nicely compositionally however, I don't think the two banners work well together yet. I think I need to work more into it with the stitching and printing and drawing with line because the two banners seem empty in a busy way. I think all it needs is a bit more work into it and it'll be really nice. I really like the subtle pink stitched bird (although it took me ages!) - it adds interesting texture and detail to the piece - I would like to include more of this in my work.

As I was waiting for the banners to dry when I first painted on the vivid blue ink, I started two other smaller pieces. I'd seen other people using brown paper and newspaper and thought the effect was interesting so I wanted to experiment with it myself. I wanted to keep some of my original work in the piece so I added blue fabric and decided to use the fish head image and mono-printed that on the work in different places and positions to get the feel of our earlier work coming through. I was really pleased this effect but I thought it still looked a bit lacking in colour so I added some red/pink ink to link back again to the original work and stitched on some interesting loose shapes in thread (in dark blue - again selecting a colour from my earlier work). I thought the ink would be quite bright and vivid but it came out quite dull which to begin with I was quite disappointed with but as I carried on I really liked the effect. It made the picture feel aged and almost vintage which I loved. I really like these two pieces; I feel like they have been  very successful because the colours worked really well together, I like the composition, I think the texture is interesting and I love the effect of the mono-print.            

I didn't really think textiles would be something I would be particularly interested in (although I was looking forward to it and I do like lovely patterned cloth) but I found myself really enjoying the week and have ended the week thinking seriously about surface design as an option. I really like that surface design can be quite illustrative and although I still want to specialise in Illustration, I'd love to spent some of my time working on some surface design within Illustration.