Inner excavate along 1

I have not posted for a while, so here's a post from another blog I started for journals, but I decided two blogs is a bit too much, so I am reposting it here.

for week 1 of  inner excavate along, I used my hands as my photographic focus and wrote about them.  Then I made it into a slide show.

I am only a week behind ;-).  My photos and those of others can be found here

Quilting every day

 This blog is supposed to be a record of my work and an incentive to do it.  Two of the things I think are really important in designing and creating my art are free machine practice and sketchbooks.  I am not as diligent in either of these two things as I should be.

I am going to try and do a quilting sample every day.  It is something I need to do, because my quilting is a little haphazard at times.  I will be doing a little four inch sample each day and will bind them with eyelets and rings into a little sample book I can use to refer to and to show.

Here are the first two pages, each bound differently.  I will also try and include lots of different bindings as well.  I could back to back the samples so two make one page, but I feel it is better to be able to see the back - and to include not so perfect samples like these.
My method so far is pretty simple

I draw the quilting lines with an iron off pen  with a little practice bit outside to start with.  In the first two, I only started to draw the pattern, since it repeated and I wanted to get to the stage of doing it without lines, however with this one there is no repeat.

Another thing I think I need to do every day is to take photos to use in my sketchbook, art book and journal.  My sketchbook is where I simply draw and paint.  My art book is where I encorporate mixed media and samples into little pieces of work and my journal is my notebook, where I record ideas, write notes to myself and generally nut things out.

So here are today's photos

This is an anemone or windflower leaf.  I love the edges of these leaves.

This is a dietes, or native iris, of which there are many in the garden.

I love this picture.  It is a grape vine leaf on our very overgrown fence.

Lastly, this is a very naughty blackberry, which has been poisoned, but keeps coming back, but the flowers are pretty.  I also like briar roses, which are similar, but pink.
There is a significant trend in my photos, isn't there, but this is what I see each day.

I will try to post on these two things once a week or sometimes every two weeks when things are really busy.  I will also try to include examples of using these two things, like quilting in pieces of work or sketchbook or artbook pages.

Celebrate design - 2

The next steps in my process.
These pages show some thumbnails of my ideas regarding the theme.

Some are more detailed than others, and you can see that I go back and make changes.  I decided that the two in the middle with the double ended arrow could be merged into one idea.  sometimes I need to add notes, as in the bottom thumbnail, to remind me about what is in these quick sketches or what they symbolise.

This thumbnail was developed a little more with some calculations and extra notes.

Whilst this last thumbnail is more detailed in the notes added.  Allof the diagrams are just that.  They are sketchy notes that may become work.  From these, hurried sketches, I create mock-ups in photoshop which I print out full size and put on my Design board for a while.

As I am walking past them each day, I make mental notes of additions to make, of how to do certain parts and alterarions to make.  Here are five mock ups.  Some are a printouts of only one layer of the piece, some are just line drawings, and some are just photo collages.  All have had changes made to them since this photo and there are  a few more of them now.
At this stage, I might take only one of them to the final stage, or I might take them all and add a few more.
This is only a design process and changes will happen at other stages as well, so the final work might actually bear little resemblance to my initial mock up.  And of course, the photo mock ups have no texture or dimension.  They are just flat pictures, so changes may occur when they metamorphosize into textiles.

Remember everything in your sketchbook does not have to become a finished piece of work.  They are just ideas that you are playing with.

Taking the design process back to front

Today, I am going to talk about another WIP and how my initial design process there was the reverse in many ways of the one I began describing yesterday.
Sometimes, I have an idea in my mind for a long time and I might look for reference photos or inspirations for a while before I even think to start and in this case, I did not even start with a sketch.

I had been given some SWARF (this is metal filings, like steel wool, that comes off a lathe when turning metal), because I had commented that it reminded me of the froth on waves, so making a piece with it became a bit of an obsession and of course my love of all things watery came into it.
The pictures above, (from geograph.org.uk via wiki media/creative commons) were my inspirations for this piece because I wanted waves crashing over rocks.
Instead of sketching, this time I began with the fabric itself.

In the picture above, I have simply pinned scrunched fabric to a board where I thought it might work.  Of course, I pinned and repinned added and took away and looked at it and went away and came back.  In reality, my composition bears no real resemblance to any of the pictures, but takes ideas from all of them.

On my board, this does not look as balanced as it does in the picture.  This is an important point.  Sometimes, simply putting a frame around your work or cropping it can help to give it substance and depth.  See this recent blog here by Diane Perrin-Hock.  After looking at the photo, which is a crop of my collage, I opened it in Photoshop Elements (I am not going to go into detail about HOW I did it, only WHAT I did - How is an whole other blog) and decided that the sky needed a bit more room, because I felt there should be splashes of foam up higher. Below, I have extended the sky.

 Also, this collage does not have the metal filings on it yet, so there is another layer above the waves, which you will see as I make up a simplified colour map of my piece in the steps below.

Here is a simple line drawing, made by tracing over the photo above, then saving the tracing as a new picture.  As you can see, I am not particularly precise when drawing on the computer, but IT DOES NOT MATTER - it is just some lines dividing the different areas of the picture.

 Here are the first two layers, the black and brown of the rocks (obviously, the black is below the brown, like a shadow, but still, no need for real accuracy).

 Next the dark and medium blues of the deeper water, both in the background and a little in the foreground.

 Pale blue in the foreground water and the white foam (slightly grey so you can see it)

The final layer (also white) is where I intend to put the swarf to imitate froth.
But there is still something missing.

Here I have added a few highlights to the rocks, as it is a sunny day.
Now, I have a basic diagram of where I want things to go in my piece, so I can take all the fabric off and cut and manipulate it to make the textures I want, and when I put it back, it will probably look a lot closer to the final piece than my original simple collage.
Obviously, the colours I have used in the diagram are only a guide and are more values than actual colours.  They are areas where I might put several different pieces of fabric in the appropriate colour/value range.

So this was a different way to design.  This way is more hands on and about playing with fabric to get the effects you want - in a general way, which can then be refined later.

Don't forget to play with fabric - It's the best way to understand how it can go together.