Blogs

for assignment 3 they suggest we try working with tyvek. I tried one experiment a couple of weeks ago, based on a tutorial I saw on December 2014's workshop on the web issue. it said to iron the tyvek then paint it with acrylics afterwards. well, I tried it and didn't like how the painted version turned out. at all. I really liked the plain, white ironed tyvek - the shapes are amazing. very organic. like pebbles in a stream, or cells in the body. I like the ridges on the reverse side also. but I must have painted too thickly with the acrylic paint so I think I ruined them. then last night Hanna posted her watercolour painted versions on the textiles facebook page and they looked amazing. she'd made them look so fluid. she said she painted with really watery watercolour, then used a heat gun to shape the tyvek. so I tried again last night using watercolour, ink, charcoal, brusho, coloured pencils, pastels - this time painting them first, then ironing to get the shapes. much better! I like these attempts much better than the initial ones. Barbara mentioned you can use silk dyes too (setasilk) and stitch them before heating too. that makes more sense as the tyvek I have is soft like paper originally but once heated becomes like hard plastic, so I'm not sure how stitching it afterwards would work.

tonight I went to a drawing class with Daniel O'Toole aka Ears, a Sydney based painter and now video artist. Ears is one of my favourite Sydney artists and I'm lucky to have one of his paintings. now I can see how contour based his works are. the class was held at his studio called "Higher Ground Studio" in Leichardt & was lots of fun. we did some mark making exercises to different styles of music, drawing different words, blind contour drawings & contour drawings where we added shading/colours to the shapes, drawing by rubbing out the charcoal using putty rubber, making a variety of marks, drawing a landscape with our marks and we finished up with a collaborative painting of a brown, flattened box. I only had butchers paper instead of cartridge paper so some are a bit rough. we used mostly charcoal and ink with a touch of coloured house paint.

http://earstotheground.net is Ears' website. apart from amazing paintings, he has also uploaded some of his sketchbook pages which are pretty inspiring. some of the line/contour drawings remind me of Carla Sonheim's ones and class exercises where we try to draw animals. Ears draws faces — there's a lot of portraits with masks/faces in his paintings
http://earstotheground.net/Sketch-book

some paintings from Carla Sonheim's flower crazy 5 week class. I'm learning a few new techniques for watercolour, gesso, and mixing colours and textures to create "imaginary flowers".

layers of watercolour lines and pens/markers with some pencil shading

painted imaginary flowers in watercolour with gesso painted over the top

watercolour blobs in 3 colours, with gesso masking off interesting shapes to create flowers. scratched lines and textures in the gesso before it dried

plus one of the "2014 — year of the fairy tale" exercises — this is my "princess and the pea" mixed media painting. it's gouche, gesso and pens. the paints are applied using a credit card instead of a brush. it leads to a "free-er" line. I liked the gouche — they dried very quickly

making some geometric fabric folds on cotton since my copy of "Shadowfolds" book by Jeffrey Rutzky and Chris K Palmer arrived. this one is called "Fujimoto's twists" — it's a mixture of stitched squares, triangles and lines, and is a bit like smocking. I need to iron the front side flatter, but happy with how it turned out. I'd drawn the pattern shapes freehand instead of tracing the pattern as the book suggested, so the shapes are slightly uneven compared to the examples in the book, but I'm OK with that. makes it a bit more organic.

they don't take too long to make either — I made this sample over a couple of hours whilst watching tv.

front side:

back side: (actually I like this also as a front side — might do another)

Shadowfolds book:

I sat down again to my stitch noodling frame today to relax and play and tried some thinner cotton. this time double stranded sewing thread. tried some button hole stitch — still my favourite ever since discovering Junko Oki's work — especially her circles, last year. the first row is a row of straight edged button hole stitch. for the second row, I noticed the thread was settling into the fabric in a more organic way, not wanting to stick to the straight line. so I let it go, and it made this really nice organic, jagged line which I really like. it's a bit closer to an open (loose) cretan stitch, but also looks more like a heartbeat, or simple audio waveform. sometimes it's worth letting go of your plans to find the better line.

I've started the "sketchbook now" class to practice more drawing techniques for my sketchbook, and in lesson one we need to do some tests of our materials. I've used some from previous class exercises, which I hadn't added to the blog, so adding them here as part of this class' notes. the watercolour washes tests were exercises from Fred Lisaius' class "Fall Watercolours". I'll add more tests here as I work on them

these are the watercolours I'm using most often — a mixture of Schmincke and Winsor & Newton pans:

testing different lines & pen textures:

watercolour bead washes:

watercolour wet in wet wash:

watercolour double wet / flood wash with salt added for texture. I used table salt and since the paper was thick, it didn't work too well

more watercolour washes, on thicker, handmade paper

watercolour pencils (texta zoom brand) and pens to see what they looked like with added water:

I'm trying techniques for the fabric manipulation part of assignment 3 and came across this note called gorgeous fabric manipulation (velvet) so I tried it. I only used very small fabric samples to make initial tests, and I should have used a heavier weight fusing/interfacing as the velvet is heavier fabric than the light fusing I tried. apparently this works well for silk too

Use a cooling rack that has both horizontal and vertical grids. place velvet upside down and with a pencil push little bunches of fabric through. Take a fusible interfacing and then place on top of tufted velvet (wrong side) and iron. The grid should have little feet on sides so that the velvet is not crushed.

at first I couldn't understand what she meant by using the pencil — I thought she meant to put holes in the velvet, so I only tried this on a very small piece, in case it didn't work out. which it didn't. but I did like the grid indentations in the velvet, so the experiment wasn't all lost. I was going to try a metal collander also but the holes were too small for the velvet — perhaps silk would be better for this as it's lighter fabric, though it would also be a hard surface to iron.