A Creative Approach — Project 1 Marking marks — Stage 2 — Exercise 2 — Making marks in an expressive way
This exercise involved using different pencils to show 3 areas of tones — dark, medium, light.
I used a mixture of graphix and graphite pencils of different grades.
A Creative Approach — Project 1 Marking marks — Stage 2 — Exercise 1 — Making marks in an expressive way
Stage 2 – Exercise 1
Making marks based on the words: fast, slow, hard, sharp, soft, delicate, bumpy, smooth, sensuous, sad, happy using a variety of pencils
The first exercise we had to make marks using the theme words. I did this in my A3 book. For this exercise I used an HB pencil, charcoal, and a watercolour pencil
For the first page, I tried one square for each word:
Then I changed to using one A3 page per word for a few selected words.
fast:
slow:
hard:
fast:
slow:
fast:
I retried this exercise on 7th July after watching the introduction videos on “Introduction to Art” course on coursera.org.
today I went over to Eva’s place and we ran through the Chapter One exercises – well, started them at least. so, finally my sketchbook has something in it. I have been feeling a bit overwhelmed by this part of the course – which is strange, since I signed up for the class and I was keen to start, but having to draw as part of the first exercise has been hard. it’s been over twenty years since I last drew – since grade 10 art class.
anyway, hopefully I’ve started to get through this now. I don’t think the sketches / mark-makings are very good, but I hope to look back one day and see some improvement in my work. in the meantime, I have this Ira Glass quote as my computer background, reminding me to just keep going and work through it – just do more work…
I have been to a few exhibitions and need to add these (backdated) to my blog also. hopefully this week
this morning I read the articles that had arrived in my inbox and webpages overnight and discovered a talented Sydney based textiles designer called Joanna Fowles via this article in TDF (the design files). Joanna is originally from the UK, though has lived in Australia previously – when she did a year-long TAFE screenprinting course. she then returned to England where she studied textile design at Chelsea College of Art. I love her geometric designs – featuring many large and overlapping dots. she specializes in Shibori dyeing and printing, using the Shibori indigo as well as other colours to create her scarves and fabrics. I notice Fowles also has a design featured in the wonderful “Digital Textile Design” book by Melanie Bowles and Ceri Isaac, which “covers everything students and practitioners of textile design will need to learn about designing and printing digitally”.
I made a few nice discoveries from this article too – The School is a studio and education space in Rosebery, Sydney where Fowles runs some workshops. I’ve signed up for one of her classes to make a Shibori scarf. it’s a little expensive but from all reports is worth the money, so I’m looking forward to trying this at the end of April.
also, Fowles mentions a couple of stores in Surry Hills – I went to these today, as it’s been years since I went shopping in Surry Hills – though there’s a fabric store nearby that I’ve been meaning to visit for a while – and found a lovely handwoven beach / bath towel at Collector Store. I had a look in The Standard Store located on the other corner of the block but the garments, whilst lovely, were out of my price range. I particularly liked the colourful hand-knits from Erotokritos and if I’d had a spare $250+ and were a couple of sizes smaller I might have bought one. in the meantime, I joined their Facebook page so I can see if there’s other fabrics I like.
other discoveries include Kinfolk magazine – I tried the ipad versions of the first three issues – unfortunately subsequent issues aren’t available for the ipad. I might try find a printed copy of it, as those first three issues were great – it’s just the amount of time it takes to arrive from the USA that puts me off often. also, Patternity has some great patterned images, and Synaptic Stimuli is aptly named for the visual feast that it is.
Today I went to the “Landlock” exhibition at the Casula Powerhouse.
Landlock explores a parallel relationship between Afghanistan and Australia: one is geographically defined by surrounding land mass; the other, completely surrounded by sea. The exhibition aims to highlight that such differences have produced a shared dialogue about the political, social and physical environment occurring between the two regions.
Artists include: Khadim Ali, Rusdi Anwar, Sanaz Fotouhi, Andrew Garton, Nasim Nasr and Amin Palangi
photos I took at the exhibition
I loved the work with rust, and the patterns printed onto the cardboard boxes, with the stories of women encoded in these.
the Shaun Gladwell exhibition of his war paintings was held at the gallery concurrently – this was also interesting to see.