It's Been A While..

It's been a busy few weeks trying to get on top of everything ready for my degree! I've spent hours embroidering, designing and making and now the end is in sight. Recently a friend took photos of my work for my digital portfolio so now pretty much everything is done and its just tweaking a few bits to make them complete.

I was so pleased with the photos as it has finally made it feel like I actually have work. The pieces that I have been working have been running with my theme of pastels shades and flowers; hand drawn and photos. 

Here's a selection of what I've been doing:

Untitled

Daisies

Daisies - Detail

I am now in the process of trying to work out how I want my work to be displayed at the degree show and for final marking. I will try to remember to take a photo of my work all set up! I am going for a Vintage Haberdashery look by having an old cabinet filled with old sewing bits, embroidery's and books. I am then mixing this with my work which has all been done on mainly old scarves as I like to reuse things within my work. The idea of it is to have this cross-over of old and new and of getting people to question which bits new and which bits old.

Inspired Hand Drawings

From having a go at cutting out flower heads to use a design, this inspired me to do more drawings. I have been taking more pictures of flowers of different varieties to mix up what I have, here's some of the more recent photographs..

Carnation 

Chrysanthemum 

Lily

I really love how removing the background from these flowers changes the impact of the image. I thought about trying these out with my own hand drawn designs. Some of the drawings I have done are based on the flowers I have recently taken pictures of and some are from previous photos.

Hand Drawn Flowers on Fabriano Paper

Florals

After the last Blog post, I looked a bit closer at the particular designer behind the beautiful floral dresses that have inspired my work; the designer Christopher Kane.

I loved the way that he used images of real flower heads to create a pattern for a fabric..

Spring/Summer 2012

S/S '12

I have already done drawings to a similar style, where I have just drawn the flower heads and really like the striking impact these had. I thought that I would have a go at using my own images of flowers to see how they would look. I had a look through all the flowers pictures that I have collected over the years and selected the best few that had whole flower heads. I then removed the backgrounds of them to leave just the shapes. To see what they would look like on fabric I printed off the flowers, cut them out and scanned them with a variety of different fabrics behind, still keeping with the pastel colour pallet I have chosen to use.

Green Stripe Flower

Yellow Flower

I would like to now have a go at combining these with my drawings of these flowers to see how the hand drawn and digital works together. It was my birthday earlier this week and I received a beautiful bouquet of flowers so they will be making an appearance in work in the future.

Influences

Its got to that time again when I'm feeling a little bit lost. When this happens I like to look back through my research folder and point out to myself which artists are influencing me at the moment. I usually find that it helps me to focus more clearly on what I am doing and I usually come across something that inspires me to do more!

The first of those artists is Georgia O'Keeffe, I know at first she doesn't seem that relevant but I find her work a great inspiration. It is her floral pieces that I am most interested in. She has a way of painting flowers that captures their beauty in a way that isn't always completely accurate but you know exactly what that flower is.

Hibiscus with Plumeria

This way of not painting exactly as the object is, is something that I have been trying to translate into my own work. Through doing lots of blind drawings has also helped this as it has made me feel more confident about drawing. This is an important element for me, the drawings, and if I'm to create something unique then I just need to keep on doing more and more of them.

This may not be an Artist but has a huge influence on what I am doing. The Collection S/S 2012 The Vogue Edit was a pull out Magazine from one of their issues early this year. The keys trends for Spring/Summer that I picked up on were Florals and Pastel shades. This is the main theme within my work. Choosing to work with these 2 main areas has helped me a lot to be able to refine what I am doing. I like to look through the S/S Magazine as I find it very useful to get ideas on different patterns and layouts. I think that I will have another flick through later to see if it can give me and more ideas about how I start using my own flowers.

Priscilla Jones is a Textiles Artist who's work I cam across about 3 or 4 years ago now at an exhibition at Walford Craft Mill. I instantly loved her work for its delicate nature and loose lines. I was delighted to be flicking through Embroidery Magazine (Nov/Dec 2011 issue) and came across her work featured in there. It had been a while since I'd looked at her work and was happy to be enjoying it once more. If you see any exhibitions of her work around, I would highly recommend!

Priscilla Jones

It's Bird Time

I also paint birds for my other subject and I have been really getting into painting them. I thought that I would update you with what I'm doing..

My idea now for art is to work with the stamps that I have bought and divide them into countries. I am then going to choose a bird native or found in that country and paint it alongside the country made of stamps. I am still looking at the idea of migration, so when I research a country if there is a bird that migrates between two of those countries I have stamps for I will probably do something with this.

I have been working mainly on a fairly large scale (well for me anyway!), roughly A3 sized pieces. I have recently just completed a mini series of birds and stamps of Britain. I am going to try and get these three pieces framed as I'd like to see them finished.

Robin

Wren

Blue Tit

At the moment I for once know what I am doing in Art, and enjoying it! Lets hope that the ideas hit me the same with Textiles soon...

Digital Prints

I have been working on some digital prints, I have now got 3 printed. I have enjoyed doing them as I have finally been getting my head around Photoshop. The first that I got printed was an A4 repeat of the hand drawn flower design that I posted about last time. The next are developed from this print where I have taken the rose from the design are put this into a half drop repeat.

I have taken the first print that I did and embellished back into it with hand embroidery. I have taken the time to split the threads down so that they aren't too thick and chosen a colour that matches the flower. Just to get an idea of what the embroidery looks like I have started off by just embroidering one of each flower. This is so that I can look at the type of stitches that would be suitable for each flower.

Digital Print on Cotton 

Here are the two Rose prints that I did..

Rose Design on Silk Georgette

Rose Design on Silk Cotton

I'm not really sure what I want to do with these prints yet; I might embroider the one on a coloured background to make it into a piece of textiles art that could be framed. With the other I might just cut it up and reorder the flowers to make a different pattern.

I was in a way, lucky enough to have extra copies of the first print due to smudges of ink across 2 of the. This has meant that I have had more to play with. My first thought was to have a go at ironing one of the extra prints onto bondaweb and cutting each of the flowers out individually.

Flowers Cut Out and Ironed onto Bondaweb

Flowers Laid Out

I really like the flowers just piled up or laid out. I can see the ones that are bagged up being as part of a set to make your own cushion or something along those lines....

Finding My Way

I think that I have finally found out what I really want to do and am now on a massive flow of getting things done. Through getting frustrated with the Disperse Dye Printer not working well for my prints, I decided that I would have a go at drawing a design that I could then just simply scan and have a go at digitally printing. 

Pen Sketches of Various Flowers

After I completed this drawing I felt really happy with the outcome that I had and it really gave me a lot of confidence about having a go at getting a print done. I had set myself a day when I was going to go up to University and attempt to get my designs printed. At first I thought choosing Friday 13th wouldn't be a bad thing, I got up and ready without anything going wrong and then I got to my car. I don't have the best luck with cars. A while a go someone knocked my wing mirror off and since then it has been carefully taped on and had no problems with it. Being parked on a road full of student houses was only really asking for disaster. Well anyway, I went out to the car to defrost it and found that my wing mirror  had come unclipped; me being weak couldn't push it back in. So after all my efforts of getting up early and ready to go up there, I couldn't. I had a tutorial booked for Tuesday where I was hoping to get help on my Digital Printing anyway so thought that I am better off leaving it now. 

I had a tutorial with my embroidery tutor and just from talking to her made me feel so much more confident about the work that I was doing. During the tutorial she gave me a quick run through on how to use Photoshop, only a few basic skills but it was enough to make me feel better about having a go. I then went to a Digital Print Refresher the following day and this just made me feel more relaxed about having a go. I have still yet to send anything to get printed but I have been busy working on my presentation. I'm going to another Refresher session on repeat pattern tomorrow so hopefully after that I will get printing!

In the mean time whilst trying to keep sane over writing my presentation I have had a go on the sewing machine to create a similar effect that I create through hand embroidery.

Machine Embroidery

Although this technique allows a much faster result than hand embroidery, I think, as the lines are solid it doesn’t quite have the same effect. I do think that this would be easy to try and overcome, simply by changing the colour of the top thread. Choosing a thread that matches the background may help to give the illusion of broken up lines like with the hand embroidery.

Hopefully next time I'll have some Digital Prints to show!