Developed Colour Drawings

Although my work is quite similar to Michael Kidner’s work I have decided that I will not participate in that live brief. Although looking at his work has been quite helpful when creating my own: 

 I’m not sure my work would be totally appropriate to that brief. I also really like the look of the Gawthorpe Hall project and think this would be a more inspiring project to take up. I feel like if I took up the Michael Kidner brief I would just be creating work I was going to create anyway. It makes more sense to me to take up a live brief that inspires me to create new work instead.

 

In light of this, I have continued my sketchbook in order to create a little book of colour. I absolutely adore doing these drawings, although they are quite time consuming. My latest drawings have explored using watercolour one way and brighter lines drawn the opposite way. I love the colours produced by the watercolour and the bright contrast of the inks.

I think these would be really interesting to reproduce with the idea of cutting holes into fabric and then laying or stitching threads behind. 

I have also done some drawing that play around with the idea of shape as well as colour: 

I really enjoy these drawings and see a lot of similarity between these and Victoria Snape's: 

Like my more recent drawings there is a geometric look that has been disrupted by a hand drawn element. 

I look forward to taking these drawings into fabric, I will experiment with aplique, hand and machine stitch, making sure I pay attention to the white space surrounding and colour matching. 

Developement

After deciding that the large scale samples were not quite appropriate for my work I decided to try and create some medium sized samples that could potentially be used as "ribbons" in something bigger to try and maintain some of the colour intensity. However I found that I really liked them as a little collection that gradually increase in scale: 

I enjoyed creating fabric samples with the embellisher and then using the photocopier as a tool to manipulate these samples. 

I then decided to print these onto acetate to see how the opacity affected the drawings, and then developed these further by adding a solid satin stitch. 

I thought it would be interesting to make these little pieces into something light could come through. So working with my scale I felt that fairy light shades would be an appropriate context for my work: 

I really like the way the light comes through and creates different coloured shadows. Although I think my work does look good in a lighting/interiors context I think next unit I would like to try make some more final products.

I can maybe see my work as smaller feature such as a pocket or edging on a garment, alternatively as a bigger statement piece such as a scarf: 

http://scarletchamberlin.com/2014/10/09/full-mooned-darning/

 It would also make a good feature on accessories or perhaps even interiors such as cushions. 

Up-scaling Samples

In order to upscale my work, I have experimented with a variety of techniques. I have created patchwork sample using disperse dyes. I also tried to recreate the grid effect using satin stitch and fill stitch on the multihead embroidery machine.

I really like this sample because I feel I have successfully used a fully computerised technique to create something with irregularity that reflects my hand drawn style. 

I also experimented with the use of ribbons and disperse dyed fabrics. Again by creating small irregularities in a larger repeat pattern I've feel I've added an element of the hand drawn. 

I also attempted to produce some prints using my smaller Bradford Brief sample and taking it into photoshop and editing it.

 I really enjoyed doing this in photoshop however I’m not really sure what kind of context it could be applied. I also feel like digital prints are a little flat to fit in with the rest of my work, so maybe next time I would produce some that I could work back in to.

Finally I like this patchwork sample made of fabric I have disperse dyed and cut up and patched back together. I feel it best represents one of my samples blown up to A2 size.

Although I am pleased with the outcomes and can see them more easily fitting into a fashion or interiors context, I feel that my samples are more interesting on a smaller scale. Larger scale samples seem to lose their intensity that is so prominent in my drawings. I also found that to maintain the intensity, the samples were equally, if not more, time consuming. Finally they lose the slight optical illusion effect that is quite prominent in both my drawings and the smaller samples. 

Reflection

I am pleased with the board I have produced for the Bradford Brief, I am really like my needle weave sample however I feel like I need some more direction in terms of my context. I feel like designing for a collection of final samples is very difficult to communicate visually. 

I found the two tutor crit this week really helpful. I enjoyed hearing lots of fresh opinions on my work as well as suggestions for new techniques. I am looking forward to developing my work further, I am looking to increase the scale of my work by using printing techniques and found fabrics. By using these techniques I should be able to create less time consuming samples.

It will be really interesting to see how the scale of my work affects the intensity of colours.  

I also got some helpful advice at other artists to look at that produce similar colour based work such as the Bauhaus Weavers:

https://uk.pinterest.com/explore/bauhaus-textiles/

https://couleurblind.me/2011/08/23/gunta-stoelzl/

I really love the colour use in these pieces and really relate it to the way I use it in my drawings. And although these are woven pieces I feel like they are particularly relevant to my constructed style of embroidery. 

Colour Curation

I had the opportunity to show my colour blind friend, who sparked my self-initiated project, all of the samples I had made and it was fascinating to hear what colours he could see. There were a few colours (particularly the pale pink and the bright turquoise) that he saw to be a different colour pretty much every time he came across it. It helped me see in my own work how the surrounding colours have an effect on one stand-alone colour. Also it was encouraging to hear that although he said it wasn’t very obvious to him, he was starting to understand the concept of the colour purple which he was previously completely blind to. Although I am not sure of the final context for my work, it is really satisfying to have produced work that has so positively impacted on someone’s life and quite literally their vision. This has impacted on some of the research I have done for my dissertation and encourages me to keep my eye out for arts/health and wellbeing opportunities in the future. 

I have also been offered the opportunity to exhibit my work in collaboration with some Art History/Curation students which I am very excited about. The exhibit is called “Curation of Colour” which is obviously a fitting theme for my work. Having sent the curators images of my work they have offered me a window space so that the light can really enhance my work. I am excited about collaborating especially because they have not asked for a specific piece to be made they just want to curate samples I have already made, so it will be really interesting to see how they curate my work. 

Experimenting

This week I experimented with lots of different techniques creating a range of samples. I really like the effect created by contrasting a bold machine satin stitch with the more irregular hand stitch. I feel this reflects well where I have used different media in my drawings.

In an attempt to create some speedy samples I tried to lay down threads and stitch over them. Although I like the colour mixing in these samples I feel like some of the linear and grid qualities of my drawing have been lost.

To take a different approach I experimented with some beading in between machine stitches which although I quite liked the contrast in weights of fine fabric and heavy beads however not all of the beads were opaque and some of the colour intensity was lost. Also I feel that the uniformity of the beads means the hand drawn qualities of my drawings have also bean lost.

I also found this with some samples I created using water soluble. I found that a lot of the linear grid qualities were lost and that having a white background would better reflect my drawings.

I have also created some only hand stitched samples, the first of which was needle weaving. I really like this sample because I have used the three primary colours and woven variegated threads through, which really recreates a pixel effect. I also like this sample because it creates a little series and sits well in the white space around it.

This week I would like to try and keep my backgrounds white to better reflect my drawings and experiment with found materials such as ribbons to help make some of the processes a bit quicker but still maintain a strong grid structure. 

I really enjoy creating these small scale samples, I think in terms of context I would like to produce a collection of final samples that might be bought by others as inspiration. It would be interesting to try and produce a sample book similar to the work available from James Hare Or some kind of colour trend book similar to ones found at: http://www.james-hare.com/607-embroidered.html

Colour Research

Having spent the summer doing drawings extracting colour from places I’d visited over the holidays, I was swapping visual research with a fellow art and design student who is colour blind. He told me he couldn’t see the colour purple. I was really taken aback by the idea of someone not being able to see an entire colour. So I started thinking about ways in which we as humans create colour and mix colours. He is blue/pink and green/red colour blind so it would make sense that he would struggle to see purple. After considering ways in which colour is made up on screens in pixels I decided I would see if there was a way to translate this effect into fabric. After exploring and looking deeply into woven fabric that use different colours for warps and wefts and how that can drastically change how a colour looks I decided to create some drawings:

I have thought about using lots of different materials for my drawings including inks, crayons and coloured papers for collage, however I feel these crayon and ink combination drawings are particularly successful. 

I think I’d like to experiment using the embellisher and couched down threads as well as experimenting with different hand stitch techniques such as needle weaving and kantha stitches.
I think it will be really interesting to see if I can recreate this different marks made by the different media I have used and whether I will be able to maintain the same level of optical illusion as I have managed to achieve in my drawings.

I really like the “grid” quality of my drawings and how this reflects woven cloth in my drawings and I think this is something I want to try and recreate in my embroidery.