Today I surprised myself!

If I'm asked if I can draw I say no, because I can't get the results I want and don't know how to do anything that will make things better. I've read enough to know that I draw what I see, not what I think I see and that negative space is important, but the theory doesn't prevent the final result from looking primative, naive ...? I'm searching for a word that better describes the lack of depth in my drawing even on those occasions when I manage to capture a reasonable likeness to the subject.

A couple of weeks ago Channel 4 ran a 5 programme series on life drawing . It's described as learning to draw from a tutor, but is more an opportunity to see a model for 30 minutes whilst listening to the artist working. I've watched three of the five programmes so far and I've enjoyed my first attempts enough to think I could look for a proper live life class to see if I could learn to draw, in spite of the results! (But then I wouldn't be thinking about it if I was happy would I!)

Today was slightly different, I grabbed a pencil and some paper and drew the model (the only programme with a young female model, as it happens) and was quite pleased with the overall likeness, but I can never manage the shadows I see.



I decided to find a graphite pencil I have thinking a thicker line might make me draw differently. I couldn't find it so decided to use some charcoal I'd bought for a class last year. I haven't used it since because I couldn't control it and didn't understand the oft repeated phrase 'working into it' - nor did I like the smudges.

I quickly sketched a basic frame for the model then worked on top of it with the charcoal, the likeness isn't as good and there's a lot that could be corrected, but the joy was working with the charcoal - it was amazing! I seemed to have so much control (with so much to learn too) that I can't understand why I didn't like it before, other than the fact that we were drawing 2D shapes and using very heavy shading. Perhaps the fact that I was working quickly meant that things eren't too laboured?



Whatever the reason, there is enough here for me to continue playing - I was amazed at how much I enjoyed myself!

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ciné film by jenny downing
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Dreaming in colour

..... and a strange colour too.

I woke over the weekend to 'see' a colour scheme, almost a finished piece in fact, in my mind's eye. The weird thing is that it was lime green with dashes of dark fuchsia and black, not 'my' colours at all. I can't associate this with either a dream or a real visual cue.

I had to go into my room and pull out some fabrics, and it took quite a lot of will power to not stop what I'm working on and start fussing with fabric layout/proprtions etc. so clear was what I saw. I'm pleased to say that I resisted!

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Mechanical by matthew_moss
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Gimp - selective colouring

A Friday night after a fretful day, too tired to think but still too fretful to relax - the answer, play on the PC. A search for GIMP tutorials produced this http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Selective_Color/

Which led to:



Which in turn came from http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01/88507076/



Used under Creative Commons License - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/deed.en_GB

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contrust by miuenski
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CQ Summer School - I'm still thinking

By far the most exciting activity at Summer School was the screen printing, but as I don't have a wet area to work in other than the kitchen sink, my explorations are fairly limited. I'm also very aware that, unlike some other techniques I've learned in the past, this is going to need a lot of experience to be a good way for me to colour fabric. I'm not sure whether the hit and miss results as I experiment will satisfy me, so do I commit time to exploring further or just be grateful that I had the experience? CQ Summer School - I'm still thinking!

But for posterity, some early attempts, all done on fabric roughly 12" x 12":

Torn paper as a resist



Acetate stencil as gelatin print



Acetate stencil used as screen print resist, fabric previously printed



Glue as a resist, on previously printed fabric



My favourite - a 'mopping up' from the one above!!!!



A second print with red paint pulling some of the black through the screen with it

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geometría callejera by bachmont
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More Little Gems

Freedom - text by Bertrand Russell, machine quilted hand embellished



Floral Gem - hand coloured background, stamped flowers, machine quilted.

Photoshop into GIMP (2)

In today's post Karen wrote about Photoshop Curves - this is new to me but I love the effect and I have a curves tool in GIMP! But I've just found out that I need to index the colours before it will save the file as a JPG, ah well, lesson learned and recorded! (Image saved with 256 colours)

A first tentative attempt:



But then ......

Photoshop into GIMP (1)

Karen Stiehl Osborn has been blogging her use of Photoshop over the last couple of days. I don't have Photoshop and I can't decide whether it's the geek or the quilter in me that wants a copy. I could buy a lot of textile paint for what it costs. So a while ago I downloaded GIMP an open source program which is pretty similar, but has a different vocabulary for the tools. I play a bit and leave it, then forget how I got the results I got, so in attempt to record somm of it's capabilities I'm going to try to replicate Karen's effects in GIMP. Yesterday Karen explored Photoshop "Cutout" Filter, the nearest tool to this in GIMP seems to be either the posterise tool Colours > Posterise or the colour indexing tool under Image > Mode >

Karen's image:



My image, with the Posterise level at 9:



The colour saturation is greater on my image which I think (hope!) accounts for the difference. Taking the indexing down to 9 produces this version:

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Roof trusses, Bodnant Garden Cafe

CQ Summer School Workshop

It's a couple of weeks since I went to the CQ Summer School at Alston Hall and did a workshop with Jette Clover, but I'm still mulling over the ideas that I picked up, few of which were directly related to the tools and techniques we used.

We printed, we stamped, we made our own screens for printing and used various items as a resist, we did gelatin printing and all the way through Jette subtly but insistently made us ask questions of ourselves.

Before dinner on the Saturday evening, having worked at a pace with messy materials, we were told to clear everything away ready for a sewing session after dinner. We each ended up with a twelfth section of a piece of fabric that each member of the group had created during the day. The challenge was to combine them, using hand stitching and little pre-meditation, into a single piece to display. Inevitably I was drawn to a grid format but the variety produced was amazing, even more amazing was the calm that stole across the room as we each became absorbed in the task at hand - it was wonderful.

It was pointed out to me, thanks Davina, that with a little re-arranging my piece would fulfill the size requirements for the CQ JQ challenge. The red bands were from the fabric scraps that we took with us, the quilting and cheesecloth were added later at home.

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The ones that got away

I've not posted much lately and these are one of the reasons why.

This piece was made to demonstrate the stages of stitch and flip, using a grid. I thought that I'd try to be clever with my grid, using a strong contrast to illustrate the point. At each stage I thought I could counteract the dumpy nature of the beast - a little gem it isn't!

This piece is showing much paler than the real thing, but it illustrates the point well enough. I followed Judy Austin's free pattern on the Little Gem website, making a whole cloth quilt and rollering it with paint to age it. I enjoyed the quilting so much that I overdid it, with the result that there is little change in surface texture. It's been suggested that I could use it as a background for 'something' but nothing springs to mind!

Procrastination - again!

Just before the bank holiday weekend I read an article about procrastination (will I ever remember to write down the sources of these things???) which acknowledged that spending time in front of a screen is the easiest form of procrastination there is. The solution was to realise that that was what you were doing and spend that procrastination time elsewhere, doing something 'useful' instead like the ironing or preparing veg. for a meal.
These tasks are finite so there is a what next element when they are completed, but also in completing them they don't get in the way of the time you have when you're working on something interesting.

I tried it, it works. Now I just have to remember to do it again!

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ROBOTHUMAN, 2009 by fragmented
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

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rust ii by miuenski
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

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Building a Mondriaan by Netream
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6 Small Things You Can Do When You Lack Discipline

So it's not my fault that I can't get into a routine - http://zenhabits.net/2009/05/6-small-things-you-can-do-when-you-lack-discipline/

Mind you if I followed all the advice on zenhabits and other similar sites I'd spen so long taking small steps to ...... that there'd be not time to live my improved life!