Still Experimenting!

I've not been to the Grand Canyon, but the above was an exercise in my Wednesday morning art class, where we used thick, mouldable medium to create some of the striped and weathered rocks found in Arizona. Obviously we had some photographic images to work from. I may try to create an abstracted image in fabric, using paint and stitch.

I am also experimenting with acrylic paint on mountboard, using layers of thin paint, and rollering, scratching into, and printing with foam stamps.

Some results from my Tuesday art class above and below. I used some card that I had painted, and rollered etc., and then continued to print with some of my hand made foam stamps before cutting up into regular strips. We were still using the art of Rosalie Gascoigne as inspiration. After re-arranging the strips, I used my mussel foam stamp again. The colours below are better than above, and represent more accurately the finished results, so I'm not sure why the image above is so blue!

Finally, my two latest photographs for my Kairos challenge. I have printed each one twice, and this time, I have painted over the top, to see what sort of results I could achieve. All very experimental stuff and I am really enjoying playing with these images in as many different ways that I can think of.

Lovely spring weather at the moment here in East Sussex, but I think it's all about to change. If you are in the Northern hemisphere, I hope that Spring is springing up for you too, and for those of you in the Southern half of our planet, I wish you a mild, calm and colourful Autumn.

Art Classes.

At the moment, I am enjoying two separate art classes, both with different tutors, and in different locations. One is about developing sketchbook ideas, and the other is a mixed media abstract landscape class. Strangely, they are both complementing each other, and so I am finding that I can use the techniques from each with the other! Above, you can see how I am developing some ideas based on the work of Rosalie Gascoigne. We started out with a mind map, which we then referred to for ideas which we have been developing in the sketchbook class. Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos of how I started with this, but it is now quite different from my original collaged page. There are so many layers involved, but it is these layers that give a depth and richness to the work so far.

The third photo above is showing one of the results from my mixed media abstract landscape class. Our starting point, or inspiration was rock formations. The paper I used was first painted in stripes with subtle variations in colour, and on paper of varying textures. This was then torn to give the shapes you can see, and pasted down onto a prepainted piece of mountboard. 

I am hoping that my next step will be to finally print one of my finished pieces onto cloth, which I can then enrich with stitch. All very exciting, and I am looking forward to seeing how these classes help me to develope further inspiration for my textiles.