...and Stage 6

When I started to think about this exercise I thought it was meant to be based on an image from a well-known artist, so I spent some time looking through my books and thinking of how to represent textures. It was time well spent because when I re-read the instructions and realised I was to work from one of my own sketches I had a fairly good idea of what I was looking for. This is the image I chose:

 When looked through the viewer became this:

And from here I decided the two most interesting areas to work from would be the little brick wall  with the white flowers and the rose bushes/plant pot. But first I had to choose the colours and proportions which meant undertaking a mammouth task of tidying up my yarn stash... (that was a good by-product of this assignment). Then I placed yarn and ribbon by the sketch to see which ones would match the colours better.

I decided not to use buttons or bits of fabric cut outs. Instead I settled for yarn and ribbon in a rough hessian fabric. I dyed the hessian to emphasise the dominance of greens in this image and to provide a background to my chosen two areas of interest.

And here they are: the wall and the rosebushes.

There are a variety of stitches here, straight ones for the bushes, knots for the little flowers, long pieces of thick yarn couched for the log over the bricks, weave for a big round bush I made up, cross-stitch for sm roses, chain-stitch for the off leaf etc.

What have I achieved? Answers to the questions.

1. I do feel happy with the work. I've enjoyed doing it and thinking about it in the meantime. I found I don't like to discard ideas but it has to be done as otherwise I'd end up with a mess of cut out bits and pieces, ribbon, beads, buttons and everything from the box.

I experimented with 'metal embroidery' and made a sample of nuts, cable and other materials bought in the local DIY store. I didn't enjoy this. The work was hard and didn't look too good either. I guess I was expecting a uniform stitch of shinning metal and all I got was a very scratched and rough-skinned pair of hands... Still, another experience.

2. I see stitching as drawing with thread, yarn and fabric. I find both activities very much connected and this connection is becoming more and more obvious as I'm also dyeing my own yarn.

3. I find stitches to be the equivalent to brush or pencil strokes. Different stitches give different feelings and textures, not only that but also we have the distance between stitches, the direction and the patterns they create to express ourselves. The threads and yarns would be like the paint, again with different colours, textures, thicknesses etc...

4. I enjoyed looking through the sources of material to work from. I found a wealth of inspiration all around me, not only from the art books, but also from nature: plants and trees, animals, volcanoes, rocks, and the landscape around: buildings, roads, diverse objects - so many things. I think I chose a right variety of themes and I notice I tend to find most of my inspiration from nature - although I also worked from images of interesting buildings.

5. The two little samples work well as individual little yarn paintings. I noticed the process I went through when working on them is very similar to that I follow when painting. It gets to a point when the image I'm working from becomes incidental and the painting/embroidery takes a life on its own. It becomes a purpose in itself. For example, in the sketch there's a pretty shapeless bush behind the white flowers that 'wanted' to be palm shaped when I was stitching it... Things like that happen often when I'm sketching or painting. I do find difficult to faithfully reproduce anything. It's like I'm acting as a filter that colours and changes reality through my hands and body. I guess it would not be a human creation if I was to just copy it - it would lack soul.

Having said that I did try and be a little bit disciplined so that anyone looking at the embroidery and the sketch could see a relationship between the two little embroideries and the corresponding sections of the sketch.

6. At this particular moment I'm in love with yarn so I did prefer them for the texture creation. I've been abducted by fibres and yarns recently, I'm dyeing, carding, blending, spinning and knitting my own yarn, and very much looking forward to weaving it too. I'm experimenting with spinning different thicknesses and textures of yarn, single ply, two ply, merino, alpaca, silk, blue-faced leicester... so yes, Yarn (with a capital letter) is what inspires me right now.

7. I enjoyed trying different stitches. I would like to experiment more with colours but I guess that's the next chapter... I look forward to it. I did write some individual comments on the different pieces to accompany the pictures. I don't feel I've finished with experimenting with stitch and embroidery. In fact I don't think I'll ever feel I have 'completed' this process.

8. I can see the value of both ways of working, however I do find inspiration from the materials so I tend to start with an idea (either on my head or on paper) and then let it develop when I start seeing it taking form. I find this tends to produce more interesting results as there's an spontaneity that doesn't happen if I try to stick too strictly to an original plan.

9. There are many more techniques I'm looking forward to trying, like felting, weaving etc... as well as more embroidery stitches. I like to see the interplay with colours, different threads, fabrics, translucent effects, perhaps working with several bits of fabric and cutting bits off to show the fabric underneath, dyeing parts of it, adding beads, sequins, stones and bits from nature... all sorts of things. There are more ideas in my head that I've got time to sketch, let alone produce.

10. I would have liked my machine embroidery to work properly. For some reason it tends to break the thread very often. I tried adjusting tensions, bought different types of needle, used different fabrics, but to no avail, in the moment I tried free-hand embroidery the thread would break and got nowhere fast... perhaps I'll have to be a bit more creative with this and embroider using zigzag and plain stitch only... or get a new machine!

...and next comes Colour - I look forward to it.

Back to planet OCA

Stage 5

I finally managed to get organised and get my notes together so that I can match them to the images to blog this exercise instead of just dumping them, so here it is: Stitches which create texture (this time with explanation):

Here are some of the stitches I made for this exercise. Initially I did some to see the interplay between the distances, the effect of the empty spaces, by using the same stitches and colours just spacing them differently (bottom of picture - full work on page 49a of the sketchbook).

Then I introduced different tones/shades of the same hue and combined them with different types of stitch to see the effects they produced.

Finally I looked into the feeling of the different stitches by adding a pattern - I found this will have more uses from a decorative point of view. It will be interesting and fun to experiment with different colours but for this section I stayed with blues.

For this one I varied the direction and size of the stitches. I love the movement it creates. This movement becomes emphasised by the colour change of the thread. I'm pleased with this little rectangle of stitches.

Here I looked for inspiration to the marks from the beginning of this section and reinterpreted them in embroidery. The concepts represented here were (top to bottom and left to right): slow, sharp, delicate, and sensual.

I found on the previous group that I had been quite close to the original marks so I decided to re-invent a little more, this time using a coloured background. I painted a plain bit of cotton and went to work.

For bumpy/lumpy I used a strong contrast thread to the blue backround and a smooth matching one. The feeling here was a soft smooth line that flowed until it finds the 'lumps' in the way of orange woven circles and then the red knots standing out from the fabric for extra 'lumpness'.

For sad I used dark, low saturation colours, as in the original marks. This time I added a variety of stitches, but all in the vertical, straight line that for me 'reads' sobriety and sadness.
And finally happy. As in the marks exercise happy has circles, bright colours and little happy patterns with dots and stars. The flowing line reminds me of party decorations, paper chains and fun times.

Still here... but very busy!

I haven't had much time to knit nor write lately.

This is because I've been:

experimenting with natural dyes (here in silk yarns)

dyeing wool with indigo...

embroidering...

and spinning!

Here are some samples of the colours I dyed (with natural substances):

cottons (fabric)

and yarns(wool)

So far I've used English Madder, Indigo, Logwood, Alkanet, Turmeric (I'm pleased with these) and Annatto, Golden Rod, Heather, Safflower, Marigold (nothing to write home about... OK if you like very pale shades). I've got some Ivy marinating and my next experiments will be Weld, Cochineal and a couple more I'm waiting to receive on the post... Pictures coming as soon as I've got some results.

I have also got some acid dyes and I intend to dye some silk skeins... and combine them with my homespun wool (blue faced Leicester and merino). I'm also waiting for some interesting fibres: milk protein, corn, ingeo and bamboo...

Some of the work I'm doing is for course assignments (embroidery), and I hope at the end all of it will count towards it. I'm certainly learning lots and I'm having such a great time!

At the moment all my 'insights' are being jotted down in bits of paper here and there... once the frantic activity and experimenting subsides I will put all my thoughts down on 'keyboard and blog'.

The natural dyeing is very interesting as I'm building a catalogue of colours and even though I think some substances are pretty much 'non-events' I'm still learning and find this to be valuable as I never know when I'm going to need soft shades. At the moment I do prefer darker and more saturated colour.

I'm hoping to go back to part-time work in May, so I will have more time to do what I love as right now I'm only dyeing/spinning/working on the course/knitting at weekends... I'm feeling tired but happy and with lots of ideas simmering.

I'm also looking forward to the chapter in colour. I still have to do a piece or two for Stage 6 of Assignment 1. I've looked through my art books and there are a couple of lesser known Klimt portraits I really like for textures and colours, however when I photocopied them for the scrap/course book, the colours came up all wrong! I have printed them from the internet but I'm still not happy with the colours I've got. I think I will work from the book's images and just use the print-outs to refer to (noting that those are not the colours I'm aiming for.) I've selected some scraps of fabric, ribbons, buttons and yarns for this exercise and I'm looking forward to getting stuck in ;-) ...and I'm waiting for more colours to arrive to add some of my 'creation yarns' to the exercise.

PS: I didn't dye a single egg this Easter!

More shortly. Bye for now.

Marks into stitches - the value is in the 'journey'

Continuing with the marks into stitches I have come up with some interesting insights about myself and my processes of work/motivations. I was expecting to find at the end of the making marks chapter some sort of final assignment, a project where we finally put our learnings to a practical final product. I was a bit surprised there isn't such a thing. The process is the product. I realised this said more about me than it said about the course... so something for me to concentrate on is the journey as well as the destination.

 

This theme was also highlighted in the way I completed the last stage. To begin with I did read and followed the instructions from the workbook. I looked through the paintings, selected the ones with interesting marks and then went on to represent the marks into stitches, whilst trying to make some little textile pictures I could hang on my wall (talk about product orientated!). Whilst stitching I did focus on the different textures and how to express them, both by hand and with the sewing machine - however the main focus of the final product was the 'whole' rather than the 'parts'.

When I realised what I had done I decided to be a bit more disciplined and to focus more on the 'feeling' of the stitch/mark, so I forced myself to depart from trying to be too faithful to the original image and concentrate on the individual marks. I did that by selecting very specific 'bits' of images, rather than the whole lot or large sections of the pictures. I also selected two of my paintings - and the bits around the sun in some Van Gogh paintings. Here are the images and the stitches I made from them:

So I think I did manage to fulfil the purpose of the activity... and learnt a bit about myself in the process. It was a valuable learning point which I can take on to the rest of the course and other areas of my life.

As a bit of explanation on the actual exercises, I was looking to express the feeling of the marks both through the personality of the individual stitches and their behaviour in groups. This is also the same way as brush strokes act, as each individual brush stroke (straight, curvy etc) and in groups (similar sizes, different sizes, following a pattern, ad-hoc, the direction they take etc) that makes up the individual feelings of the groups/sections.

I also experienced with felting - here's the result:

Still a bit uneven (although I was looking for uneaven edges) but I like the way it went and the possibilities it offers regarding textures and colours. More next weekend.

Inspired and unfocused

Inspired and unfocused - that just about describes how I felt last Saturday after my visit to the textiles exhibition. I want to do it all and to start now. That's very typical of my way of doing things. Part of my personal process at the moment - and with this course specially is to get the discipline to do one thing (or 3 - but no more!) at the time, and most importantly: to finish what I start.

A while ago I started a project: the Beltane top. A simple pattern for a top made out of  lovely deep green silk with colourful embroidery. I decided to complete this top now I'm working on the stitching section of the course.

Here are two pictures of the Beltaine top:

First I draw the design, then I embroider the flowers with a combination of mirrors, beads and chain stitch.

Because chain and cross stitch are something I've experimented with a fair amount in the past I'm now working with different stitches. I produced a little sample to try some of the stiches from the manual.

I discovered what my old sewing machine can do by playing around with different settings and combinations - this time I have written underneath each row of stitches how they were achieved so I have a useful record for when I need to get a specific effect, instead of spending my life 'reinventing the wheel' as I tend to do.

After being relatively disciplined I 'treated' myself to a bit of crazy stitching to see the pictorial qualities I could achieve with only one colour on a 'free' stitching spree. Then I went back to the manual to see what to do in the next stage: working from images. (I feel I still could do with more experimenting with the machine and will do more next weekend, as part of this next stage.)

For this stage I've been looking through my books on different artists (Monet, The Impressionists, The Surrealists, Klimt, Sorolla, Dali, and even architects like Gaudí) - I've decided to concentrate in two pieces of work by well known artists (one by Van Gogh and another one of Picasso's sketches) - I chose those two because of their very different styles - one all curves and colour and the other more geometrical and black and white - this work will lend itself to my experimenting with different stitches on the sewing machine.

I have chosen to work with the sewing machine over natural calico with black cotton for the Picasso sketch and in hessian with yarns, by hand, for the Van Gogh interpretation. I'm looking forward to getting started on this work.

As usual I keep having ideas to do other things, so to keep my hyperactive imagination happy (use it or lose it!) I carry a little notebook in my handbag where I write notes of my ideas.

I did order a few materials and now they're all arriving - the post is getting very exciting delivering fabrics, threads, felting wool, dyes, paints... I love arriving home from work to open the parcels. I feel a bit frustrated that I cannot give more time to designing and making textile pieces, however, I've got some days booked around Easter and I might have a go at felting this weekend.

The BBC programme about weaving was also very inspiring and look forward to that section of the course.

I am NOT getting a weaving loom... just yet ;-)

Another confession: I've just ordered a natural dyeing kit... those yards of natural calico are shouting to be 'enriched' with colour...

Some pictures of my course work coming soon.

Contemporary Textiles Fair - 2010

Last Saturday I visited the Contemporary Textiles Fair in Teddington.

It was a true textile feast and came out with visual overload and inspired to the brim.
There were examples of most things to do with textiles and fibre: knitting, embroidery - both machine and hand made - felting, painted silks... All sort of techniques and products for clothing, interior decoration, jewellery, accessories were represented there.

I returned home with a treasure of ideas and resources - information on different courses and suppliers. (All will be eventually filed neatly on my hard-copy folder.)

It was definitely the place to go for inspiration.

I'm possibly the worst photographer I know but here are some pictures from the exhibition anyway...

too busy to write

I know, I know: I haven't posted a thing for a couple of weeks now. This doesn't mean I haven't done anything. On the contrary: I've been too busy to post.

Last weekend I worked on two things: one was to teach myself to knit entrelac (at last! I've been wanting to do this for ages). I succeeded and here's a picture to prove it. This was knitted with Noro Kureyon yarn which I had left over from a jumper I knitted last year. It's ideal for this sort of work as the colour changes and makes the entrelac effect stand out.

Marks from images

I also worked on making marks from images. I aimed to use similar colours on the marks to those of the photographs/objects I used as reference. This was not from a desire to emulate them but because I believe the feeling of some things has a lot to do with their colour, at least that's the case with me. I'm very influenced by the colours around me. For example in the first image, the Spanish landscape sunset with the bull's silouette wouldn't be the same without the harmonies between the blues/violets and the fiery reds/oranges in the sky. The sky colour gradation is very soft and nicely broken with the fluffy fiery clouds. I expressed this with pastels, scrapped them and rubbed on to the paper with cotton wool. I felt it needed the sharpness of the bull's horn and did this with a stencil and black pastel - it could have achieved a sharper effect with black ink but it could have been too much so I decanted for the stencil effect.

Note about colours: having realised how attached I am to colour I finished the exercise with a little activity where I aimed to express the feeling of yarn using only graphite pencils.

Flower postcard: I wanted to express the texture of the petals, which reminds me of the little rivers of water left over in the beach after a wave has come in. I used watercolours to re-create this effect. I couldn't get the water and pigment to 'stream' in the way I wanted so I creased the paper to create texture within the folds for the watercolour to play with. This worked to a certain extent. On hindsight I could have used cheaper and more creased paper to take on the effect a bit better (I used Sennelier smooth watercolour card). The result was a little too soft so I added the yellow and black and the contrast brought up the violet, which is what I wanted.

Peeling door: This picture comes from a book about Indian decoration although it could be a peeling door anywhere. I've always liked this picture. I aimed at achieving the texture of the peeling door, showing its different previous 'reincarnations'. In the first interpretation I used wax resist working in reverse time order, that is firstly the most recent colour layers with the wax crayons and then the oldest colour with watercolours.

The second interpretation was done using gouache and a spatula to try to reproduce the process of paint over paint and then distress it. This could have also been done using dyed gesso although it could have looked a bit too much like a plastered wall... there's an idea for another effect.

Looking for resources I found some pictures I took years ago for a friend's cookery book. They had interesting textures so I represented them as follows:

Lemons: white crayon to create a resist for lemon yellow watercolour. I was also interested in their regular shapes and started using stencils for the individual lemons. I felt it started to look too tidy, too uniform and almost 'institutionalised' so I moved away from the order and 'messed them around' a little. I think a bit of chaos worked well here as it represented better the lemon peel texture.

Tomato, peppers, and spiky yellow/green mousy things: Three different textures for which I used three different techniques. Tomato: smooth, soft and shiny. I used cotton wook soaked in white spirit and rubbed on to oil pastels and then applied to the paper to create that smooth texture. Violently red peppers: The lovely colour and shine attracted me to this image. I expressed this in two ways: the initial soft shine was created by rubbing the pastel redness out and the strongest shine with white gouache straigth from the tube.
Small green vegetable things presented a different challenge. They have a 'prickly' feeling and bright colours. I went for an almost puntillistic effect of greens on a lemon yellow background. I moved the pointy bits to create a bit more disorder to express the sharp and rough texture.

Marks from objects

I included in the sketch book photos as a way of referencing the objects I worked from. The marks though, correspond to the actual objects.

Tree trunk: Two very different textures came from this tree trunk. One of them is the 'fluffy', alive and 'happy' moss, softly textured and scandalously green. I used a sponge treatment with gouache of several colours on the greens range. Then it was the actual trunk, rough, woody texture, which I expressed through the use of thick gouache applied directly from the tubes and spread on the page with a spatula. The little flakes of lychen reminded me of small butterflies, fragile and in a way different from the tree although living in it, so I did use little bits of tissue stuck to the paint to achieve this effect.

Pottery: I used three of my favourite pots as I felt that, although made from the same type of material (clay) their feeling and texture are quite different.
1. Glaced, smooth pot with 'craters' created by exploding bubbles on the glace. I used wax resist to represent the shine on this pot with the addition of gouache mixed with dishwashing liquid. I was expecting to create exploding bubbles from the washing liquid, but it was not to be. I tried to get the roundness of the bubbles with some stamping but I didn't succeed in expressing the 'craters' the way I wanted.

2. Raku bowl. The interesting cracks of the glace at the bottom of the bowl caught my interest. I used a rubbing effect of turquoise oil pastel over a brown watercolour background. I also sprinkled some silver powder to get the shimmery effect of the bowl.

3. The little pottery box has a lovely deep velvety quality to it, complemented with the smooth copper patterns in a traditional Spanish floral motif. To capture the matt, velvety effect I used pastels by scrapping different greens and applying them repeatedly over the page, spraying fixing liquid between applications. When I was happy with the intensity of the green background I used copper dust and water to express the feeling of the decorations. I also used the copper inkpad with the paisley stamp. Other thing that could have worked would have been copper nail varnish.

Ms Cuddles: This is an older photo of my son's pet rabbit. As she's grown into adulthood she has developed a beautiful long coat. The texture is soft and sensuous and has been expressed through the use of pastels scrapped roughly to create little pebbles and then rubbed into the paper with cotton wool. I used different colours on the cinnamon range.

Entrelac knitting: I was so happy with having learnt to knit entrelac that I had to express its texture in mark form. I saw many ways of doing so and I chose two of them: one was to focus on the detail of the change of direction of the knitting and the other on the actual blocks of colour it forms. I used block printing (different blocks) for both of them to best reproduce the regularity of the patterns.

Colourless exercise

In order to focus exclusively on the texture of things I drew a quick representation of some of my yarns using only pencils. I chose yarns because it's one of the things I tend to buy just because of their different colours so I thought  it would be interesting for me to concentrate on other things, i.e. shape, texture, thickness etc.

I expanded on this exercise by making marks based on the different stitches I've been knitting, again using only pencil/graphite.

What have I achieved - answers to the questions

1. I have always drawn from a slightly different point of view. More often than not aiming at achieving some sort of realism - as a graphic designer/illustrator that's what the job requires (usually). As a painter I have experimented a bit more when painting landscapes or abstracts but my main focus tends to be colour rather than feelings or textures. I found these exercises very freeing and fun although a bit frustrating at times when having to wait for paint to dry so that I can get on with something else.

2. I have thoroughly enjoyed opening my mind and using my imagination, looking around for materials and utensils to make marks and experimenting with different types of paint. I have also started to look at things with different eyes and seeing possibilities for artwork pieces where before I wouldn't notice any. I'm also photographing all sort of things, mainly greenery, leaves, plants, ivy, moss...

3. As I usually work in black ink and liquid watercolours (for cartoons) and oils/acrylics (for my paintings) I have purposely avoided these media and concentrate on other things I'm not so familiar with, hence the use of pastels, oil pastels, gouache and different techniques. I have enjoyed the opportunity of changing my usual 'toys' and the freedom of mixing and seeing them interact with each other in different ways.

4. I'm pleased with what I've been doing. Although I haven't always achieved the results I was planning I got some interesting effects and no doubt this experimentation will help my with my future drawing. I certainly have gained a lot of value from the exercises and look forward to doing more.

5. I've enjoyed all the mark-making exercises. I believe there's a strong relationship between all the sources of inspiration in that the objects generate images and inspire feelings and sensations. We use words to label those feelings and sensations. Words are also used to describe things that cannot be seen as such, but with the marks in this exercise we have been representing those 'concept' words and translating them into images. So I don't see the different parts of this exercise as entirely divorced from each other.

6. Media I enjoyed using the most at the moment are pastels because their softness and their versatility of use. Watercolours for a similar reason, also because I'm relatively familiar with using watercolours and for the lovely surprises they give you when we leave a few pigments to interact with each other through the water. I enjoyed the 'neatness' of stencils and block printing and I'm looking forward to printing and dyeing fabric - I intend to enrol in a week's summer course at Central St Martin's on textile dyeing techniques this summer (finances permitting!). No doubt all the work I've been doing is closely related to my future textiles work and I'm looking forward very much to what will come out of it.

That's all for now... tomorrow more. Phew!