Dotty Textiles: Innovative Thinking

So for a while now I have been working on a project titled Innovative Thinking. We were given the brief before Christmas but it hadn't really started until last week. The task was to find a poem that had evocative keywords in that we could take inspiration from in the form of colours, textures, sounds, locations, materials, characters or emotions.

October Days

October days! How nature shouts,

so many ways

With bundled sheaves and rustling leaves,

in splendid blaze.

O, what sights! What nippy nights,

harbingers of change soon

To come, with frosty bites,

shivery delights, and harvest moon.

Winter will march on! A howling,

blustery, mountain king

Scattering furry ones, scampering,

gathering quondam glean.

Pond and lake with icy sheen-

unlikely resting place

For airborne tenacities and dancing,

dervish lacy flakes.

Once we had a poem we had to look up the words in a dictionary or thesaurus, find the synonyms or antonyms, look for images that were brought to mind and make mind maps with things that you are reminded of etc.

I really like the idea of the snowflakes and the sparkling frosts on fields and tree branches. This led on to me thinking about seed heads that are lighted dusted with sugar crumbs of ice, and I found some really beautiful photos in a magazine which have really inspired me.

I started to take ideas for my colour palette from some of these images, sticking to quite pale, subtle, pastels which really sum up that time of year for me- quite different to the first stanza of the poem.

We had another drawing workshop to do with this project, and one of my favourite ones involved lots of different techniques (drawing with the left hand, drawings whilst not looking at what you are drawing, using different medias on top of each other, making different textures, adding random lines etc) and also grouping together with other people and sticking your pages together, then doing the same kinds of patterns on your page onto their pages to make them all gel together even more. It is a bit scary to draw all over other people's work, but you soon get in to it.