A lot of work …

but nothing to show for it – in blog terms, at least.

I spent all yesterday afternoon assembling the ‘A3 and smaller’ stuff into the A3 portfolio, and this morning doing the same for the A1 stuff. Not that there is that much of it – but by the time I’d mounted it and punched holes in it and written my evaluations on it – it took a couple of hours at least.

This afternoon was spent assembling and mounting:

1. samples from artists’ sketchbooks – which I knew I had to do
2. and linked examples of their finished work – which I didn’t. [When all else fails, read the marking criteria.]

Of course the samples I had already found for 1. had to be rethought in the light of  2. The printer has been working overtime – and of course good quality print outs use up a lot of ink - so it is all finished bar printing out another copy of a Raphael fresco, because the first one changes colour part way down.

I did make two discoveries in the course of all this – well, discoveries for me, I’m sure you know all about them.

One was Henry Moore's ‘Shelter Sketchbook’ on the British Museum website- drawings he made during WW2. If I could draw a tenth as well as that I’d be a happy woman. I think they are magnificent – and perfect for my purpose because some of them show ideas for sculptures.

The second, also via the British Museum, was Samuel Palmer’s sketchbook – quite different in style to Moore's, and strangely modern for the 1820s. [I love the way the website says the book was ‘bound originally in sheep’.]

According to Wikipedia, Palmer influenced two of my favourite artists, Eric Ravilious and Laurence Whistler. Mrs Cheddar introduced me to Whistler’s glass engravings, [here’s an example]  and now I’ve really looked at Palmer I can see the relationship.

So tomorrow – after spending an hour with my lovely but expensive hairdresser – I will print that Raphael out again [useful article in the Guardian yesterday about the importance of a Raphael cartoon and why we should prevent it being sold abroad], write some more evaluations – and start thinking about the next deadline …

Not waving but drowning …

under the volume of paper I've collected during the past few months of drawing studies, and which I've got to find, mount and assemble in some sort of order before the hand-in date. Then I have to find my sketchbooks,  write the dreaded evaluation, add some sort of discussion about artists' use of sketchbooks, hand it all in and breathe a sigh of relief, because that will be the last deadline – for a while.

 

So of course I started by making a couple of portfolios.

You didn’t think those holdalls I bought from Artesaver were for handing in work, did you? They are for storing work before I hand it in – or when I’m pretending it doesn’t exist.

These are for handing in.

Yes, I have made a couple of portfolios already – but those were for the stitch and print samples. These are for the drawing samples.

Confused? – so am I.

Anyway, they are different sizes, so I now have a full set, A1 to A4. No, I’m not going to make an A5 one, that would be silly. I am wondering whether I need a bag to hold the sketchbooks and booklets I’ve made, though ….

Procrastinating? Never!

Of course it would have been perfectly acceptable to hand everything in in polyholdalls – but where’s the fun in that?

Do I need to get a life? Definitely.

In another part of the forest, daffodils are blooming. Well, I think they are daffodils. We all need a sign of spring.

I never thought I’d say it …

but I actually enjoyed drawing studies yesterday! Perhaps because we spent most of the time working relatively quickly on exercises which did not require accurate reproductions.

We spent most of the time drawing a still life – the same still life, more or less. We drew  it with different media. We drew it with both hands. We drew it rotated, 4 times, on the same piece of paper. We blew up acetates of bits of our drawings on an OHP [I want – no, need - an OHP!] and then went over the lines with paint.

We also did a bit of scaling up or scaling down the old-fashioned way with squares. We looked at negative space and chiaroscuro. And it was exhausting but fun.

Unfortunately I didn’t take any photos before I packed the results  of all this work into my new polyfolders from Artesaver – and as that took half the afternoon, I don’t propose to haul them all out again until I have to. [Not that there are a lot of them – it is just that finding a space for an A! size folder was a little difficult.]

I can show you two more results from my exploration of things I wanted to try but hadn’t got round to.

I started with this, which I took in the snow.  Then I used a technique from Jane Dunnewold, in Issue 28 of Quilting Arts – except I cheated by using a photo. I printed it on good quality paper, painted the white bits with acrylic paint, and when it was dry covered the whole thing with Indian ink. When that had set for a bit I shoved it under the tap.

 

As you can see, the paper didn’t disintegrate – and most of the ink did wash off the paint. The point of the process is to get those grainy, etching-like lines, which I love.

 

 

 

Now for something completely different.  I don’t often wear brooches, certainly not flowery ones, but when I saw the instructions by Roz Johnson for this, in an old copy of Patchwork and Quilting, I had to have a go. [Sorry, I can’t tell you which edition, but there are kits on her website.  Oh, it also tells you that it was issue 190!]

The brooch is about 6 cms across, uses tiny scraps of felt and embroidery floss, and took an evening of peaceful hand stitching. I enjoyed it so much I’ve got another one cut out already.

Tomorrow, however, I must buckle down to work to meet the next two college deadlines!

Just pootling about …

My lack of motivation continues, after the burst  of activity last week getting ready for the first two deadlines.

And as I had to get up early to take best beloved for his haircut [every one individually cut] I had a lot of time on my hands.

So – shock, horror - I tidied the work room.

You have to understand that the word ‘tidied’ has different meanings for different people. My mother, for example, would not have regarded what I did as tidying. She had plenty of junk, goodness knows – but it was all put away. [I won’t tell you what it was like clearing her house after she died – I will just say that I doubt anyone else ever had so many drawers full of empty plastic bags.]

However, the workroom is tidied, in my meaning of the word - i.e. you can now see most of the floor and some of the worktop…

I even sorted the teetering heap of tearsheets and print outs. A lot ended in the recycling bin –‘Why did I ever think I wanted to keep that?’ – but others got put in the appropriate books and files. I now have a file labelled ‘Things to do when uninspired’ – things I’ve kept telling myself I’d get round to trying one day.

So this afternoon – I tried two.

This – from here – except Jessica’s are much more stylish than mine. No, I don’t know what I’m going to do with the idea, but I like grids and weaving. I think it might be interesting to try in fabric.

 

 

And this from here, because I bought a flower loom ages ago and thought it was about time I tried it out. [As usual my camera has failed to catch the nuances of colour – the two layers go together a bit better than they appear to.]

Flower looms, it appears, require a lot of thread and a lot of patience – more than I’ve got. I don’t see any of those flower loom blankets in lovely acrylic yarn in my future – although this Flickr page almost makes me change my mind …

And then I wasted some time trying to find some buttons to add to the collage – which is looking increasingly odd. [It reminds me of something but I  can’t think what!]

The blue circles are washout marker, and will shortly be filled with stem stitch spirals.

I have a lot of buttons – see digression about mother above – but

somehow never the right ones. I thought I had a lot of little black ones, but it turns out I don’t – probably because I made a necklace with a lot of them years ago, pinching an idea from an art teacher of my acquaintance. [Heavens, don’t I ramble?]

I decided I didn’t like it with buttons on anyway. I did find some beads –although I seem to have fewer black beads than I thought. [Blame my aunt – and me – for my collection of beads – mum wasn’t in to those. And the fabric collection is entirely my own.]

More books

Well, booklets.

One of the drawbacks of using mailers as book backs is that you have to cut down standard sized paper – which leaves you with a problem. Do I throw the leftovers away? Do I use find a way to use them - to make more books, for example?

No question.

So when I found these instructions and the cereal box booklets here, I had to have a play.

 

These are the mini notepads – a bit plainer than the ones in the instructions, but good for sticking in a pocket.

 

 

 

And these are the cereal box books – except mine used a photo  paper packet, not a cereal packet, as we don’t eat that sort of cereal. The covering  is old calendar pages.

We won’t talk about the mistakes, which were entirely my fault – it probably wasn't a good idea to change the sizes the first time I made them – or to make so many – or to do them both at the same time. 

But I like them. [I once saw Dick Emery in a restaurant in Bournemouth and he looked exactly as you would expect him to. And so did his female companion.][Note to non-Brits or those too young to remember, Dick Emery was a comedian whose punchline was ‘But I like you’ – delivered while giving his interlocutor a playful tap that knocked him flying – and while wearing drag. Naturally. But I digress.] [If you don’t like my digressions, blame Wil for encouraging me.]

Meanwhile, Quality Control was keeping a careful eye on the decorator. [Not me, I don’t do decorating – although I have got designs on that tin of white emulsion.

That stripy thing behind her is a cupboard wearing a duvet cover. Honest. Would I lie to you?

A new book, an old book, and the beginnings of a collage – sort of…

It’s been a fairly productive day, despite feeling distinctly uninspired for most of it.

I finished another sketchbook – one which I started a while ago when I painted some paper in the style of Frances Pickering. Although I loved the results, the paper has been hanging around irritating me because it raised my workroom just above my mess tolerance level – although that is pretty high. [Put it away? Where?]

Yesterday I started trying to assemble the painted pages – and a few more - into a book and made a mess of punching the holes in the spine. So I went and sulked in the bath.

Today I had another go, after rescuing the spine with a strip of duck tape. [‘If it moves when it shouldn’t – duck tape. If it doesn’t move when it should – WD40.’ Can you tell I used to live with an engineer? Although actually he is this sort of engineer. He’ll hate me if he ever reads this <g>.]

It was a bit of a fight – but I won. I think I have gone about as far as I can with the repurposed Amazon mailer sketchbook – this one weighs 750 gm and has [reaches for calculator] 224 pages. Even at my planned one drawing a day it’s going to take the best part of a year to fill – and I am not achieving one drawing a day, by any means.

I acquired two other books today, courtesy of ABE books and the postie. You may have noticed that I have a bit of a thing about old embroidery books [I have a bit of a thing about new embroidery books as well, but not as big as the thing for old ones. Feel the same about men. But I digress]

I’d read about Mariska Karasz on The Textile Blog [well worth reading if you are at all interested in textiles] and I really liked what I saw of her work. I couldn’t quite afford the book about her work – the one I did buy is a more of a teaching book, but it does have some examples, and lots of lovely line drawings in that ‘ethnic’ style that was so popular in the 40s and 50s.

I have been interested in the work of Hannah Frew for a while – chiefly because we were told we should include her in the C&G history of British embroidery, and I found it very difficult to find out much about her! So I was pleased to find an article about her in the current issue of ‘Stitch’ – and even more pleased to find she had written a book – albeit in 1975.

Unfortunately although both books were very reasonably priced – I had to get them from the US, which put the cost up a bit …

And finally – after joking about an embroidered collage for drawing studies – I started one.  Cut back appliqué, inspired by a section of one of the scans I showed you yesterday. But in reverse, because I worked the machining from the back.

 

 

It is looking a bit unbalanced at the moment but I’m hoping some hand stitch will help that. And after all – ‘it is only a sample’.

Catching up.

I spent the afternoon playing with my ‘light box’ [a desk lamp under a glass coffee table] while I worked on one of the tasks from the college session I missed in January because of the snow. [I was going to type ‘way back in January’ until I realised it was only last month – so much has happened in the meantime!]

The first task, which I did a while ago, before the great deadline trauma, was to make marks on tracing paper to sounds. Not knowing what the real sounds should have been, I found ‘Late Junction’ on BBC I-player. The programme is strongly recommended if you like your music quirky.

Then we had to layer the tracing paper, put cartridge over the top and a light underneath, and trace the marks. Like this.

Interesting, but I'm not sure I can go anywhere with them. The next step is supposed to be a collage inspired by the tracings, but – er – they don’t inspire me.

So I tried scanning the tracing paper  in various combinations.  Not sure I see a collage in there – but I see lots of stitch-like marks.

Perhaps an embroidered collage?