last saturday (31st jan) I went along to Alex Falkiner‘s “Stitching off the Page (fancy edgings)” class in marrickville. it was a lovely afternoon learning new stitches and techniques for the edges of fabric. I really wanted to learn her “netting” stitch and just block out a few hours to spend stitching. great to speak to others too
some photos of the “in progress” parts of the stitches for future reference. I felt I was having a bad day stitching – extra slow and making lots of mistakes (which given my state that week after the recent surgery/recovery wasn’t too surprising), but I’ll try these again when feeling better.
the netting stitch is like blanket stitch but you stitch into the air / where the loops join instead of into the fabric
we went to life drawing class at 107 projects tonight. Syd Mead said that if you can draw people, you can pretty much draw anything (paraphrasing), so I’d like to practice more. I’m happy with a couple of these. I was trying rough outline of shapes and concentrating on shading the shadows. one lady asked about the other colours so I showed her the pastels. J’s lines are amazing – I need to practice looser lines, and seeing & drawing volumes. and find my line at all. these are 5mins, 10mins, 15min poses – I’d arrived late so missed the 1-2 min poses. my proportions are out most of the time so this needs improvement. the model walked around later and looked at everyone’s drawings. he said he thought my last one of him “everything is expanding”, so hopefully that’s a good thing?
adding them all here, so if I keep going throughout the year, I can look back and (hopefully) see improvements, and my line. these are charcoal (vine + thicker), white charcoal/pastel and coloured conte crayons
“Solace” project: India Flint is doing a residency in South Australia in June this year, and has invited people to make flags to hang.
“Make a triangular flag or pennon [meaning a personal ensign, derived from the Latin penna meaning a wing or a feather] preferably using a piece of pre-loved cloth. Stitch on it a word or a phrase or a sentence that might act as a wish for peace or an acknowledgement of beauty, imply a sense of stillness or simply something that gives you solace. It can be as brief or as long as you like. A haiku, a snatch of song, a word that takes you where you want to be. Attach ties to the tethering end of your flag”
& then post it to the address on the page. she’ll dye them, and photos will go into a book/online.
“sunlight falls, my wings open wide” from orpheus by david sylvian, on the secrets of the beehive album, because it always gives me solace when i play it.
japanese cotton with wool thread
David Sylvian – Orpheus lyrics:
Standing firm on this stony ground
The wind blows hard
Pulls these clothes around
I harbour all the same worries as most
The temptations to leave or to give up the ghost
I wrestle with an outlook on life
That shifts between darkness and shadowy light
I struggle with words for fear that they’ll hear
But orpheus sleeps on his back still dead to the world
Sunlight falls, my wings open wide
There’s a beauty here I cannot deny
And bottles that tumble and crash on the stairs
Are just so many people I knew never cared
Down below on the wreck of the ship
Are a stronghold of pleasures I couldn’t regret
But the baggage is swallowed up by the tide
As orpheus keeps to his promise and stays by my side
Tell me, I’ve still a lot to learn
Understand, these fires never stop
Believe me, when this joke is tired of laughing
I will hear the promise of my orpheus sing
Sleepers sleep as we row the boat
Just you the weather and I gave up hope
But all of the hurdles that fell in our laps
Was fuel for the fire and straw for our backs
Still the voices have stories to tell
Of the power struggles in heaven and hell
But we feel secure against such mighty dreams
As orpheus sings of the promise tomorrow may bring
Tell me, I’ve still a lot to learn
Understand, these fires never stop
Please believe, when this joke is tired of laughing
I will hear the promise of my orpheus sing
for assignment 3 they suggest we try working with tyvek. I tried one experiment a couple of weeks ago, based on a tutorial I saw on December 2014’s workshop on the web issue. it said to iron the tyvek then paint it with acrylics afterwards. well, I tried it and didn’t like how the painted version turned out. at all. I really liked the plain, white ironed tyvek – the shapes are amazing. very organic. like pebbles in a stream, or cells in the body. I like the ridges on the reverse side also. but I must have painted too thickly with the acrylic paint so I think I ruined them. then last night Hanna posted her watercolour painted versions on the textiles facebook page and they looked amazing. she’d made them look so fluid. she said she painted with really watery watercolour, then used a heat gun to shape the tyvek. so I tried again last night using watercolour, ink, charcoal, brusho, coloured pencils, pastels – this time painting them first, then ironing to get the shapes. much better! I like these attempts much better than the initial ones. Barbara mentioned you can use silk dyes too (setasilk) and stitch them before heating too. that makes more sense as the tyvek I have is soft like paper originally but once heated becomes like hard plastic, so I’m not sure how stitching it afterwards would work. Hannah mentioned there are also different types of tyvek. I’d just ordered a sampler kit so I’m not sure what gauge mine is, but it sounds thicker than what she’s using.
tonight I went to a drawing class with Daniel O’Toole aka Ears, a Sydney based painter and now video artist. Ears is one of my favourite Sydney artists and I’m lucky to have one of his paintings. now I can see how contour based his works are. the class was held at his studio called “Higher Ground Studio” in Leichardt & was lots of fun. we did some mark making exercises to different styles of music, drawing different words, blind contour drawings & contour drawings where we added shading/colours to the shapes, drawing by rubbing out the charcoal using putty rubber, making a variety of marks, drawing a landscape with our marks and we finished up with a collaborative painting of a brown, flattened box. I only had butchers paper instead of cartridge paper so some are a bit rough. we used mostly charcoal and ink with a touch of coloured house paint.
http://earstotheground.net is Ears’ website. apart from amazing paintings, he has also uploaded some of his sketchbook pages which are pretty inspiring. some of the line/contour drawings remind me of Carla Sonheim’s ones and class exercises where we try to draw animals. Ears draws faces — there’s a lot of portraits with masks/faces in his paintings http://earstotheground.net/Sketch-book
here’s some photos of the class — my work plus the collaborative painting in different stages
some paintings from Carla Sonheim’s flower crazy 5 week class. I’m learning a few new techniques for watercolour, gesso, and mixing colours and textures to create “imaginary flowers”.
layers of watercolour lines and pens/markers with some pencil shading
painted imaginary flowers in watercolour with gesso painted over the top
watercolour blobs in 3 colours, with gesso masking off interesting shapes to create flowers. scratched lines and textures in the gesso before it dried
plus one of the “2014 — year of the fairy tale” exercises — this is my “princess and the pea” mixed media painting. it’s gouche, gesso and pens. the paints are applied using a credit card instead of a brush. it leads to a “free-er” line. I liked the gouche — they dried very quickly
making some geometric fabric folds on cotton since my copy of “Shadowfolds” book by Jeffrey Rutzky and Chris K Palmer arrived. this one is called “Fujimoto’s twists” — it’s a mixture of stitched squares, triangles and lines, and is a bit like smocking. I need to iron the front side flatter, but happy with how it turned out. I’d drawn the pattern shapes freehand instead of tracing the pattern as the book suggested, so the shapes are slightly uneven compared to the examples in the book, but I’m OK with that. makes it a bit more organic.
they don’t take too long to make either — I made this sample over a couple of hours whilst watching tv.
front side:
back side: (actually I like this also as a front side — might do another)
I sat down again to my stitch noodling frame today to relax and play and tried some thinner cotton. this time double stranded sewing thread. tried some button hole stitch — still my favourite ever since discovering Junko Oki’s work — especially her circles, last year. the first row is a row of straight edged button hole stitch. for the second row, I noticed the thread was settling into the fabric in a more organic way, not wanting to stick to the straight line. so I let it go, and it made this really nice organic, jagged line which I really like. it’s a bit closer to an open (loose) cretan stitch, but also looks more like a heartbeat, or simple audio waveform. sometimes it’s worth letting go of your plans to find the better line.
I’ve started the “sketchbook now” class to practice more drawing techniques for my sketchbook, and in lesson one we need to do some tests of our materials. I’ve used some from previous class exercises, which I hadn’t added to the blog, so adding them here as part of this class’ notes. the watercolour washes tests were exercises from Fred Lisaius’ class “Fall Watercolours”. I’ll add more tests here as I work on them
these are the watercolours I’m using most often — a mixture of Schmincke and Winsor & Newton pans:
testing different lines & pen textures:
watercolour bead washes:
watercolour wet in wet wash:
watercolour double wet / flood wash with salt added for texture. I used table salt and since the paper was thick, it didn’t work too well
more watercolour washes, on thicker, handmade paper
watercolour pencils (texta zoom brand) and pens to see what they looked like with added water:
today I went to a workshop called “drawing with thread” at the Art Gallery of NSW where we played and tinkered with stitches and coloured threads. it was taught by Alex Falkiner and was lots of fun. Alex showed us how to use different stitches to recreate drawing marks, different lines and block colour techniques, and to ask ourselves “what would happen if …”, and to find the whimsy, playfulness and randomness in making. there were a mix of fluoro colours which I hadn’t used before, so it was fun to try. very relaxing. Alex also spoke of making things that don’t *have* to be functional. this is something I need to practice – previously I’ve don’t mostly functional craft making over the years
lots of great discussions also, and names of other artists to check out – recommended by Alex plus others in the workshop.
stitches & tips:
– spring stitch (stem stitch) – transitions between shapes
– scribble on the fabric with your non-dominant hand in pencil then backstitch over it to draw the lines
– threading needles – bring the needle to the thread to make it easier
– button hole stitch for the loose netting
— —> | —> | —> | then back the other way | <— | <— | <—
– french knots – olives: if loose, then come back to the side with another colours and tack it down
– linen thread is loopy / rounded by nature so good for the curved netting shapes (gutermann linen thread)
