Part 5 Early thinking

The final part of Drawing 1 demands that I invent my own project and work through to a conclusion.

I have decided to re visit Part 2 "Your Own Environment" and work in my garden.  It is always accessible (unlike life models) and can offer something come rain or shine.  In 1998 we were lucky enough to buy an acre of land.  We took a year to build our house and then set about the garden which was just rough ground.  Sixteen years on it is our pride and joy.  Hard work aside it is now a lovely, comfortable place to be all through the year.  It has a bit of everything.

But where to start?

The manual gives me some points to consider

• subject - my garden
• format - landscape
• support - Japanese paper (became lining paper)
• medium - mixed
• line, tone - combination (became line)
• composition -experimental
• mood, story -  the excitement of texture and form
• abstract or realist - abstract
• light - natural light - natural
• size - less than A3 (became almost A2)

Not many items filled in there!  As I make my decisions I'll come back to this list and fill in the blanks with red


Maybe a little look at what I'm working with will help.

Views ....

.... tranquillity .....

and a bit of bling

The garden is exciting and it is this that I want to work on in Part 5.

I took my camera out to see if I could capture "exciting".  What I found surprised me with its variety; sometimes it was colour, sometimes form and sometimes exciting combinations.

Super combinations

The beautiful heuchera

The weird bearded iris

Orchids that arrived unbidden

Majestic foxgloves

Acanthus

Dawn redwood bark

Exciting leaves

The leaves in the last photo are very curved and I wondered how they would flatten with a view to printing.  To test this I scanned one and it flattened really well.  

The leaf scanned well enough to see the veins

I'm a bit stuck because my printing equipment is behind a heavy wardrobe awaiting collection. While I wait I decided on frottage to see what would show up.  I used copy paper and a chunky graphite stick.

Grey scale

Black and white

I was surprised that so much came through as the leaf is quite thin.  The sharp spikes are very obvious particularly on the black and white version.  There is potential for interesting mark making here.  Here are a couple of crops:

From grey scale

From B & W

I took another leaf, this time a softer one (heuchera)

Heuchera

and tried several combinations of paper and rubbing media:

The purple was wax crayon on cheap tissue and gave an indistinct impression probably because if I pressed hard the paper tore.  The mid pink was also wax crayon but on tracing paper - this too was fuzzy but in a more "foggy"way.  The red was wax on copy paper and was much more literal.  Finally I used my chunky graphite stick on tissue - a delicate manoeuvre.  This gave a very clear impression with each part of the leaf looking tree like.

I was going to try some coloured paper but I got waylaid by some blue foil.  I tried rubbing on both sides and whilst at the moment I can't see where it might go the effect was interesting.  It reminded me of blowing ink in an earlier part of the course.  It fits with the spikiness of the previous leaf.  One to bear in mind I think.

I repeated the grey scale and black and white experiment again and this is what turned up.

Grey scale

Black and white

A crop of the lower black and white scan makes an interesting image.

It looks like a mountain range from Google earth and it makes me want to stitch.

At this point I have decided to concentrate on texture.  This is no great surprise as I am enrolled on the Textiles degree.  This means that I will probably be focusing on the minutiae of the garden as I have today.



These are a couple of promising websites that I've earmarked for further investigation later on.

http://tondro.com/blog/category/leaf-monoprint-process/

http://blog.heathertelford.com/tag/art/