Diary of a Student Artist

I know I’ve been rather absent these past few weeks, and have been drip feeding my posts.  I’m still recovering from this virus I have, and I’m trying to shake this cough. I’ve also been trying to play catch-up after being off college for a week. I’ve had little enthusiasm for my work and finding motivation rather hard to come by.  I read somewhere that you should never try to paint when you’re ill as it is so emotionally and mentally draining.  I think I can agree with that sentiment.  However, I am trying to spur myself on and I bought a bunch of flowers today, which I hope to paint tomorrow.

So I thought I’d show some of things I’ve been working on this past week or so.  First up is a painting I did in life drawing, which I quite like even if it is a bit hot (colour-wise). I am quite enjoying Expressionism painting and the freedom that it brings.

I did this with a palette knife and it is the first time I’ve worked on such a huge piece with one.  Theres a few bits that could do with some definition, and other elements such as the outline that could do with a bit less line. Otherwise, I’m fairly happy with it.

The next items are all taken from my Creative Textiles class.  I based these pieces on the theme Rendezvous, which seems to have gone in the direction of secrecy and covert operations.  This has led me to focus on the all-seeing eye and the building up of layers.

The first piece is a piece of silk that I have dipped in hot wax and crumpled into a ball. I then flattened it by hand and painted on fabric dye.  This is supposed to be like a weave pattern (although unsuccessful) but it has a great texture to it which you just can’t see here at all.

The next piece was a piece of devore fabric that I had batiked onto giving the shape of facial features.  I dyed with red and black again, as I felt this was quite murky and bloody.  I then used devore paste on the material to burn out some of the fabric, making it transparent in places to reveal the layer underneath.  For some reason though, I think of the top layer as being very Banksy – completely unintentional!

The next two pieces are on the same material – some kind of cotton I think.  I dipped these into the wax pot, crumpled them, then dyed.  What I love about these pieces are that they remind me of papyrus and ancient Egyptian texts.  Particularly the second piece.  As you can see, the all-seeing eye is present in both of these images, and are repeated several times in the second.  As you may or may not be aware, the all-seeing eye dates back to ancient Egypt and the Eye of Horus. Funnily enough, I didn’t intend for this effect on my first piece, but when I saw how it turned out, I definitely want to push it further in the Egyptian direction.

This part was more considered, and I used the batik spoony/poury thing (that’s my technical definition for it as I don’t know what it’s called).  I help up the cloth after it had been dipped in wax, crumpled and dyed, and then used the spoony/poury thing to drip wax down the fabric.  I then turned it sideways and repeated the dripping effect, to get a nice kind of hatching pattern, but a few of the drips ran askew, which was absolutely ok.  I wish you could see how rich these colours look, as I’m particularly pleased with these two.

So I cobbled some of my pieces together on a large sheet of paper and painted around them with fabric dye, dragging a fairly dry brush vertically in the direction of the fabric.  I love how murky this looks.

The next piece was done by etching into a piece of polystyrene, then painted over with fabric dye.  I then pressed it onto a piece of calico giving a nice screenprint.

The final piece was done using the same method except this time I used oil paint and pressed it onto 300lb watercolour paper.  I etched a smaller piece of polystyrene with a weave pattern and printed onto the paper in blocks, then I overlaid with my main print image.  I think this has turned out not too badly!

So that’s where I am just now, and as you can see, my time hasn’t been completely wasted!