Gorgeous Grey

A couple of weeks ago I attended the 'Gorgeous Grey' course run by Claire Benn at Committed to Cloth. A couple of foggy mornings on my recent cruise down the Rhine provided inspiration for the course and my favourite 'grey' photo was taken when a passing barge became visible through the fog. I wasn't happy with my representations of the barge, and so I decided to concentrate on printing simple shapes but then they started to look like buildings.....

 



So more experimenting with barges is required and when I (hopefully) achieve the look I am seeking, I may even cut off the right hand side of this piece and print my barge on the left hand side. 

But before any printing started we experimented with making different shades of grey (and before you say it, it was more than 50!). I experimented by adding small amounts of colours to black and then reducing the value to see the different greys that could be created. 

And I had some happy accidents. An over generous addition of scarlet, created just the dusky pink I was looking for in another piece, which you can see on the right hand side of the cloth below.

And I was rather pleased with the beigey colours I created  here. Could be very useful in landscapes.

 

Another trial looked at what would happen when different values of rust orange were overlaid on different values of grey. I know all of these are going to provide useful references for future work.

Here's an 'action shot' of me printing and my grey trial pieces at hand for easy reference. 

I printed quite a lot of fabric during the course and although I didn't print anything that I absolutely loved, I learnt a lot and came away with loads of ideas to follow-up on and I'm sure you'll see more of these in time but here's one other experiment. After I created the fabric background I wet the cloth, added liquid orange dye and tilted the fabric so it ran.  

This reminded me of the reflections on the Rhine. The orange on the horizon line needs beefing up to give the colour some more depth or maybe I could enhance it with stitch? Whatever I do to it, I doubt that I am ever going to really love it. But I do want to experiment with creating pieces where I embellish just the horizon line.  How would this impact the feeling of distance? This could be the piece to experiment on.