A Cold Snap & A Frozen Canal

I saw a funny sight this morning on my way back from lectures- sea gulls hopping around on the surface of the frozen canal!! They obviously couldn't understand it, and kept pecking at the surface; some of them pecked so hard they broke the ice and fell into a hole of their own making- hilarious for me, embarrassing for them!!

Ian Davie & Painted Feathers

I thought I would share with you the work of one of my artist references- mainly because I am completely in love with what he does. His name is Ian Davie and he paints beautifully intricate scenes of wildlife onto swan feathers.

 I especially love the ones where he paints a scene across several feathers.

Whilst researching his work, I discovered that there are many artists who paint onto feathers, a popular one is Julie Thompson aka the Feather Lady.

There's even a website with lots of videos which teach you how to do your own feather painting!

Inspirational Moodboards

So, our latest task has been to collect as many images as we can that relate to our themes and to make moodboards from them (which we will draw from and gather inspiration from later). According to my tutor, my first moodboard wasn't very inspirational, although it had interesting ideas for colour.

 

 I have developed my idea from peacocks to feathers and then to different kinds of birds, looking at the colour of the feathers and how they are layered. Although for a print project, I think I will need to concentrate more on the shape of the bird as a motif- a few peacock feathers might creep in there though!

 

So bearing in mind what my tutor said , I came up with this moodboard, which doesn't have the vivid colours, but does have textures and artist referencing and some photos of complete birds.
(Personally I still prefer my first board, but doing two in one session looks good anyway!!)

Wire Feathers

Leading on from my previous post, I have been experimenting with making wire feathers in different coloured wires and then overlapping them to see if they give any ideas for pattern making or developments.

 I have also tried reverse colour photocopying them which produced an interesting result.

Peacock Feathers

For several weeks now I have been working on a drawing project based on the idea of peacock feathers. I thought I would show you some of the techniques I have been using. I have tried to be quite varied with my methods, ranging from wire pieces to simple pen drawings.

 

 So then, starting simple and with some pre-prepared backgrounds, the above sketches are done using watercolour pencils (left) and fine line colour pens (right).

 

 Some black and white drawings: Using a marker pen and some dots (left) and a really quick mono print over a wax rubbing.

 

 I really like these examples as I think they look spontaneous and were quite fun to make. Taking some cut out pieces of card from the below drawings, I stuck them randomly back together and flicked coloured ink over it, highlighting some of the paper shapes when dry with a fine line pen.

 

 This is a layered piece, with the colour coming through from the page underneath. Peacock shapes were cut out of one page and the eye of the feather highlighted on the page below with copper ink and black Indian ink.

 

 Photocopies are a really nice and easy way of generating lots of work quite quickly. These are reduced scale copies of a wire feather I made, printed onto tracing paper and glued over a tea stained background with straw blown ink. The right hand image is just the negative version of the left- to get the slight variation in colour I simply turned the tracing paper over for a more misted effect.

 

 String prints are a great way of getting different effects and colours quite quickly. I have found them very useful when experimenting with layouts as you can repeat your motif as many times as you like. These have been printed onto a kitchen towel background with a slight watercolour wash in some areas.

 

 Again, on the left hand side, we have the string prints, although this time worked over some quick ink and stick drawings. I have simplified the peacock shape by selected which areas of the string print to coat with ink. On the right hand side I have drawn around a peacock feather, then gone over the pencil with masking fluid, painted over that with ink and then when the ink was dry, rubbed off the masking fluid to get a relief pattern.

So these techniques are really simple, although they can be worked into with stitch or developed further, maybe using several techniques on the same drawing. You could bleach or rip up and collage etc

How to Make Fabric Paper

Another technique I have been using for my Rainbow Accordion Book Pages is fabric paper.
I had actually never heard of it before signing up for this particular project so I had to do a lot of researching on the subject.
For those of you who were like me and completely clueless, it is basically a sheet of thin muslin (although I have heard of examples using organza and other sheers) brushed over with a glue and water mixture. To this you can add anything you like, strips of paper, small flat-ish objects (like dried flowers, seed pods, leaves, tea bags) etc, brush over another layer of the glue mixture and then lay a sheet of tissue paper over the top with another layer of the glue stuff to finish. You could then add colour to the wet glue or wait until it is dry to add extra colour. If you have used colour tissue paper or coloured objects then you may not want to add additional colour it at all.
I have only just started experimenting so my examples are quite rough, but I have found some more professional looking papers which I will show you afterwards.

 

I have used muslin with curls of string, wire and small wood flakes trapped with a layer of white tissue paper (it appears slightly purple because of the coloured bin bag underneath- when making your fabric paper make sure to put it on a non-stick surface so that it will peel off easily when dry). I am waiting for it to dry and will then add my colour and other textures later.

When looking on Google, I particularly liked this fabric paper which has been made using tea leaves and some other bits and bobs. I think this is a really interesting idea because the colour of the tea will run slightly with the glue mixture and create interesting patterns by itself. I don't think that you put the entire tea bag into the paper, but you can tear it up a bit and remove the tea.

I think the below one is quite interesting, with free machine stitching over the top. This was found on Linda Matthews' blog, and she has some other interesting things to say about fabric paper you might want to take a peek at.

 

I think this is definitely a technique that I will be considering for my Rainbow Accordion Book- along with my yo-yos.

Fabric Yo-Yos

I got some lovely books for Christmas, one of them being Kim Thittichai's new release, Layered Textiles: New Surfaces with Heat Tools, Machine and Hand Stitch. I am an avid Kim Thittichai fan so getting the book was exciting in itself, but whilst flicking through the pages I found an amazing piece of artwork with some funny urchin-looking things on it.
It turns out that my Mum knew how to make them so I could go into instant production.
They are called fabric yo-yos and all you need is a circle of fabric twice the size of your desired final shape and needle and thread.
Folding over the edge of the circle to make a neat finish, do a running stitch all the way round. Pull the thread as much as you can (without snapping it) to gather up the stitch, pressing the hole created into the middle to flatten, then tie up and fasten off. If you are still a little confused then click here for a step by step for how to make it with photos!

I do have further plans for these yo-yos, as I am intending to put them onto my Rainbow Accordion Book Pages which I am working on for my ATC group (the photos will be up on my other blog shortly). They will have to be either dyed or painted and then stitched onto the page- which I still have to figure out how to do.