Drawing Inspired by Landscapes II

It was good to have the time to work into my sketchbook but just as my ideas were coming together and I thought I might be on the brink of something 'big', I had to go back to work! Hopefully, the ideas are brewing nicely, somewhere in my head.

I was working with a photograph where the light made the soil look a dark maroon colour and it reminded me of a collage I created using a limited selection of papers. If I wanted to represent trees and I only had pink paper left, then pink they were. I quite liked the effect of using colours you wouldn't expect to find in a landscape. So I used a pinky colour in some of my sketches. 

This one was created by rubbings and ink washes on paper, which was then torn to represent the field structure in one of my landscape pictures. 

This one was created with a wax and wash technique.

This was created with two small mono prints that I stuck together and coloured to create a simple landscape. The dark patch in the sky area looked like a tree when it was in black and white but strangely, became less tree-like once I had added some green.

 

This is a section of a larger piece which I folded in the same way as the folded paper in my my last post . It suggests rocks and water to me and I plan to work back into this one. .

 

 

I really liked the technique of folding paper to create different perspectives. Simple but effective. I also tried it on a photograph of Lake Louise and whilst it is a magnificent photograph, which is more to do with the landscape than my photography skills, I find it a little overwhelming. Where to start, how to represent it? But folding the image without thought to where abouts in the image the folds would fall, takes a lot of the dithering and decision making away from you. The folding created a number of lovely images that I could work with. I'll be doing this again.

Drawing Inspired by Landscapes

It's not often that I take time off work to go on a course but today I went to Amanda Hislop's landscape sketchbook course at Art Van Go. The first thing that I did was to draw (quickly) from one of my photographs using Markal stiks and inks. Firstly on one side of the paper and then...

...on the other side.

 

The paper was then cut to create a book-like structure.

 

The cuts and folds create mini pictures and new perspectives and here are just some of them:

 

 

 

I guess you could achieve something similar with a pair of 'L' shapes but I think the cutting and folding does make you consider combinations you may not otherwise have done.

 

It's been really nice to be 'forced' to take time out to draw into my sketchbook. It has also made me have another look at my C&G landscape sketchbook and I have been surprised by how many of the ideas still interest me enough to take them into textiles. I have many more ideas than I have time to pursue but it's probably better that way round. Of course, I won't be starting anything new until my lake piece is finished!

 

Just in case you were wondering, I did do a lot more than this today but I left the sketchbook to dry in the studio. It's a two-day course, so I've got tomorrow to look forward to, too. Hurrah!

Mapping marks

Friday evening was the annual 'Spring Fling' at my local branch of the Embroiderers' Guild and we were treated, as usual, to a delicious meal provided by the Committee members. Fiona Wilson was the speaker and it was very interesting to hear about her methods of working as she took us on her journey from Business Studies to the Embroiderers' Guild Scholar and to being the practising artist she is now.  It is always nice to see work 'in the flesh' and Fiona bought some of her lovely textiles, her sketch books and her printed blocks. I would love to have a sketch book like hers and I feel inspired to do some more sketchbook work myself . I couldn't resist buying one of her blocks that were for sale.

You can't see from the photograph but there is a 1p piece embedded in the back and I wish I'd asked her about the significance of it. It's adds interest to an area you wouldn't normally pay very much attention to. Fiona also ran a workshop for us, which I was looking forward to even more after the talk.

In her talk Fiona told us how important drawing is to her and her design process and I made the promise to myself to do more drawing. It wouldn't be too difficult to do more but it would be difficult to do less! So it was no surprise when we started the workshop with a number of drawing exercises. We had very little time to do the drawings & this one was I did without taking the pen off the paper and without looking at the paper. Mmm....Starting to draw can feel quite daunting for me but I felt quite liberated with this method because there was no expectation that this would/could look like the image I was copying....and it didn't!

Fiona showed us some of the creative machine embroidery techniques she used and encouraged us to try as many as possible. Although, I tried a number of them, possibly the simplest stands out in my mind. I really liked the plain straight stitch, sewn with a matt thread on the top and a metallic thread in the bobbin. The metallic thread showed only slightly on the top but really lifted the stitching. This may be one way to use some of those cheap metallic threads I have, which always seem to break when used as the top thread.

I was keen to incorporate maps into the day and in particular the old fabric lined map that my friend Laura had given me. I embellished the map onto a piece of blanket and as the fibres of the blanket were pushed to the front, the map began to take on a more textiley  look and feel. I also embellished blue scrim, from the back, roughly where the water was on the map. I then used a couple of the machine embroidery techniques which I had tried earlier and 'corrected' and an area on the left hand side which I thought was too dominant by embellishing it to blend it in.

Here is a close of a section of the piece, albeit that the piece looks a bit washed out in photograph.. The bluey pink area which looks like a finger print is the area I embellished to tone down. Who would have thought that this had been really obvious zig-zag 5 minutes before? Who would have thought the surface was made of paper?

Next steps? Well I feel some hand embroidery is now required but finish my first piece for the next round of Whispers first......