AliaK's blog

crazy birds is a tutorial from Carla Sonheim. I tried it tonight. it's a good exercise to help "free up" your drawing and lines. and can be done with kids, as well as adults (kids at heart?)

you start with two pieces of paper. draw circles on one, flower shape / petals on another. cut into quarters and arrange onto the page and draw in the bird shape. use a variety of materials

I think I could try this exercise using fabric also instead of paint

another exercise I learned from one of Carla Sonheim's classes, is to practice seeing shapes — animals and other things, in the cracks and lines and shadows on the footpath and other places. I think this might be a type of pataphysical drawing exercise too.

collating some of them here — most a "imaginary animals" or "blobimals" as it's fun to draw them, and they seem to be everywhere once you start looking! it's like finding animals in the clouds.

some I've done:

and some shapes I've collected and am yet to draw the "blobimals":
some are obvious, and others less so..

sometimes I don't have my drawing materials with me so I've started making quick drawings on the ipad. collating them here..

some are freehand scribbles / warm up drawings and others I trace photos on different layers — selecting which lines/details to include in the drawing.

Assignment 2 - Review

My learning log for Assignment 2 is at http://www.explorationsintextiles.com/assignment2 — there are links to the exercises on this page. You can also access the pages via the menus — see Textiles1 - Assignment 2.
Assignment 2 — Review
I enjoyed this assignment and most of the exercises, though I though there was some repetition in the exercises and some of the instructions were a bit ambiguous and unclear. I liked exploring colour and seeing how the colours were created and combined, and being able to reproduce and match colours to other images and objects. I also enjoyed learning more about watercolour painting and how to use watercolour to layer colours to blend them and create new colours. It was good to try many other techniques also and to be encouraged to use different media in some of the exercises to see how they can change the way the image looks, and the feel of the image.

A2: Proj5 - stage 3 - printing and painting on fabric

see also previous exercise, printing and painting experiments for other printing and painting work that I did.

painting and printing onto silk:

painting and printing onto calico:

I concentrated mostly on mono printing using the gelli plate for the printing tests on other fabrics. not all of them worked out, which was to be expected, since not all the fabrics were suitable for printing. the cotton based fabrics worked best. the shiny, slippery fabrics didn't work very well - they didn't hold the paint. I left some of the original fabric showing, so I could see what the original fabric was.

a variety of different types of fabric:

A2: Proj4 Stage 3 "Selecting from drawings" and Stage 4 "Developing design ideas"

I combined these two exercises and found new images and drew my versions of them for design ideas.

 
review
did you manage to make space move?
I'm not sure. in some of the drawings I think it did, but in others, it didn't really — some of them are too "flat"

what are your thoughts about the drawings you did in stage 1?
I can see how the eye's attention and focus is drawn around the page by the placement of the black squares on the page. and the use of single versus multiple squares. it highlights the idea of using whitespace, and how to draw focus for the objects.

A2: Proj5 - stage 4 - a larger sample

I created a "single unit" piece based on a motif. the background is mono printed by hand, and there's an image of a stylized face hand drawn using fabric sharpie pens over the top of the background. the image is based on an image by Jim Avignon.

I combined a tribal motif border around the image of the face. I was influenced by a photo of a tribal patterned top that I found on the internet when searching for "tribal patterns". also I was influenced by Hundertvasser with the colours chosen, and brightness of the colours. I'd seen "Hundertwasser's toilets" in Kawa Kawa not far from Auckland, earlier this year, and enjoyed seeing his use of bright colours, and wonky, stylized lines. I'd tried some of his style of work in my sketchbook, and had been using some of the patterns in the final piece in exercises throughout this assignment, so it was a matter of combining them altogether.

A2: Proj4 - stage 2 - experimenting with techniques

Note: this section is not numbered as a separate Project, but it had Stages 1-2, so I've called it Proj4z on my blog to keep the posts ordering in order.

in this exercise, I experimented with lots of printing techniques.

blotted line printing
I like this sort of printing as it is a style that Andy Warhol used during his early commercial art career. he used to print multiple versions of his drawings for clients and colour them in different colours to show them. this helped him to get more work, as he had multiple options for his clients.

it's fairly slow work. you draw an image, then draw it onto tracing paper. then tape the tracing paper adjacent to where you want the print to appear. fold it over so you're working on the underside of the tracing paper. then apply ink to the drawing on the tracing paper. and then fold it back onto the page, and it prints the lines. it also leaves "blotted lines" ie lines made up of small dots and ink blobs. you should only ink a small section at a time as the ink dries quickly so you can only "print" a small section at a time.

A2: Proj4 Stage 2 - exercise 4

for this exercise, I drew my ink bottle in various materials

A2: Proj4 Stage 2 - exercise 3

I selected the circular image for this exercise and painted it using watercolours, drew it with watercolour pencils, and use pastels, and made a collage of it.

first attempt at weaving in cloth. there's quite a few 'mistakes' where I flip flopped (let's call it "flipped a bit" in engineering terms) but it adds to the charm and makes it unique (& if it were a gene, then now there's a new mutation?)

I like the looser weave when I first started too - I almost kept it like that but decided to finish it to see what it'd look like. I did manage to pull the fabric and create a hole in the corner though. I tried to get variable spaced warps but then this slowed the weaving down a lot as I made more mistakes and had to work out where I was more often. I used different thickness & colour threads to create some more variation.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/aliak_com/sets/72157645331553742 has more pics

I'm going to have to try more of these - it was great fun. this is inspired by jude hill's "considering weave" class

inspired by jude's opening post, I started a mind map to begin my "considering weave" class workbook.

I've been working on my fabric loom tonight - the invisible basting is done, next up loading the warp & weft. I looked up one of jude's videos from the hearts class to remind me how to do it - a great resource!

a drawing showing all aspects of the marked off area used together

once again I liked the 'ghost print' on the page underneath

this weekend I've been trying to catch up on my printing for assignment 2 ACA. but was "distracted" by doing some online classes of Carla Sonheim's. one was a gelli plate printing class, so I'm waiting for my gelli plate to arrive. will try similar on other makeshift plates during the week (am home with my materials for a couple of weeks). the other one was a watercolour transfer class. these are some of the watercolour painted tshirt transfer papers so far. the work is still in progress...waiting for it to dry properly then add some other media, then do/test the prints onto paper & fabric. the watercolours react nicely to the coating on the paper. I hadn't tried this before. Carla does some amazing work - I've been really inspired and hope that one will turn out as nice as hers (one day). I've signed up for her 'imaginary creatures' class that's running this week also and have started reading her books (the kindle ones). the book speaks about footpath/cracks animals. I took some photos of water splotches on the footpath near home and I can really see some imaginary animals in them so hoping I can turn them into little prints for my niece & cousins kids. maybe a little zine of them. not sure yet. (I've taken pics like this in the path, often of the outline that a stray hair makes on the bathroom floor - my hair is long and straight but tends to make curvy shapes as it falls out).

I read about the "brushes" ipad app so I've been trying it out this weekend. it allows you to draw in layers. so far I've been roughly tracing photos from my photos collection to practice and get a feel for drawing lines and objects & people. I know we should do more freehand drawing, but i get quite disheartened that mine don't look like the original, that I don't feel like doing any more. with the tracings, i can see the image coming through and it's teaching me to see the shapes better, and to select which lines and shapes and shadings to include and which to leave out. i think this is half the battle of drawing - deciding what to include and what to discard that still gets your message across. I'm using my finger to draw with and still getting the hang of the app's brushes too, so even though I'm tracing, it's still not looking exactly like the original. but hopefully it's training my hand eye co-ordination a bit (more than not drawing at all). here's the first attempts.