I mentioned last night that I was given a couple of briefs for today’s classes. I had to bring in an item from home and an image. These were based on the theme of ‘my space’ and they were to be representative of me. I choose a chicken hat I have, and I took in a couple of my paintings for the image section as I couldn’t decide on a single piece.
Armed with these I went into my first class, which was Sketchbook Development. I explained to the tutor that the they represented the five year old in me – my inner child if you like. The tutor told me to zone in on a specific aspect, such as the heads on one of my images. She gave me a few artists’ names to research and get some ideas on technique. I sketched out a few images, taking snippets of the one painting and breaking them up into 4 individual pieces. I used various techniques such as the ones I used yesterday.
I used very similar media on the first two rectangles: a few coloured oil pastels, covered with Quink, and then bleached in certain places. I used glue to sketch out the contour lines of the face and border, filled in with acrylic paint, then applied Quink all over. Once I’d done that I went over the glued contours with bleach to give a lovely rusty colour to the outline. I then covered with a tissue to soak up the ink, and pasted this beside the bleached contour image.
For my second image, I used masking tape to produce an outline of the face, and covered either side of the outline with glue again. I then applied the glue, in strands, over the ‘hair’ area. Once I did that, I covered the blank areas with candle wax, felt tips, and wax crayons, then soaked the whole page in Quink adding bleach into the hair.
Then for the final image. I tried to incorporate more of the child aspect, and used masking tape to give the outline of a swing, whilst retaining part of a face, such as the eyes and nose. This time I used several layers of differently coloured drawing inks, and then I laid down acrylic ink in splodges and sprays. I dried the acrylic ink with a hairdryer, which gave a great crackled effect. Then finished it off with blue ink. I have yet to add some wire to give the effect of the chains for the swing.
These images are all highly experimental, and completely from the imagination, so are in no way polished pieces, but these are only for the sketchbook. Once I’ve completed the sketchbook with ideas. I will then develop my ideas further towards a final piece, which will be quite abstract, and nothing like I have here. The point is to develop ideas. This is where my second class comes in – the Project – and is tied in with the first class. Here is where I brainstormed for ideas.
I started thinking of my chicken hat, and what it says to me. I wrote some words down like: childish, playing, climbing trees, cartoons and from each of these words I branched off into such things as: monkey puzzle, grandparents and many other words. From there I drew my hat and added in some of the words I came up with. I was using a book that had thousands of fonts, which I projected onto my paper and traced over. That’s as far as I got today, but I will be adding magazine cut outs and tonnes of other bits and bobs I can get my hands on. I can’t believe I get paid to do this! It’s such a fantastic thing to be doing. I have lots of homework but it’s hardly what I’d call arduous when it’s such fun! I have the day off tomorrow so this will be my research time. I will be doing some paintwork as well for my sketchbooks, so I’ll post when I’ve got them done.
