Summer Project Stresses

I'm currently anticipating a summer project from Cardiff met where I'l be doing my degree in textiles. So this post is about the summer project I did last summer for foundation.

I find summer projects stressful, how much work do you do? what if the others do the same?? How do you complete a project without studio equipment???

Anyway the brief for this project was "Survival" I began in the usual way, mind mapping and researching before deciding to work with themes of surviving grief and loss.

I filled a sketchbook with lots of research, visits to galleries, photo's, samples and drawings. I drew motifs such as poppies, pocket watches and hands.

For my samples I experimented with combining stitch and image transferred photo's.

I made work representing each of the stages of grief; anger, loneliness etc. I used harsh stitching over some photo's to portray pain, and used bleach over photo's to represent loneliness and fear of forgetting lost ones.

My final piece consisted of three canvas's, I combined stitch, text and image transferred motifs. I stuck to a colour pallet of white black and red, and matched elements of each of the canvases so they worked well together in sequence.

We had to present our projects in front of our lecturer's and class on the first day. I was glad that I had a strong project and my lecturers appreciated how hard I had worked.

Remembering the responses from this project and with all the confidence in my work I have gained on foundation, really I should have nothing to worry about for any projects that may be coming my way....

Ruffled Feathers

The screen printing process on foundation was completely different to what I was used to at collage. On foundation we used the photography dark room and exposure machine to prepare the screens.

It took me a while to get to grips with the process, but screen printing is one of my favourite textile processes as I love printed textiles, so I struggled on.

We were given the brief of taking photo's outside uni and creating patterns from them on Photoshop, to eventually print. 

I was interested in the feather as a motif, I think it makes for an intriguing aesthetic, and has all sorts of connotations.

Overall I was pleased with the days work. I think the colour tones are key to the success of the prints. 

Life Drawing

I created this life drawing during a large group session, the whole course sat in a huge circle on the floor drawing our model.

I used natural food colouring and a stick. This one went down well with the lecturers, and my parents liked it too! I'm not sure what it is that makes it work so well...

Cityscape Illustrations

Using a fine liner pen and square white paper I drew the views over Swansea from the top floor windows at Uni.

I tried to pick out sections of the view and create compositions around interesting points, such as buildings iconic to the area.

50 Drawings Project

One of the mini projects on foundation was called "50 Drawings" we were given fifty phrases all about colour such as;

• Blue movie
• Black as night
• Green with envy
• Yellow belly
• Seeing red
• Purple Prose
• White hot
• Silver screen

There were more inspiring phrases and proverbs but these were what I could remember. The idea of the project was to explore colour, use an imaginative variety of techniques/mediums. (pencils were banned!) and come up with creative subjects.

Fifty large drawings seemed quite daunting, looking back I wish I'd been less worried and more free with my approach to the task. In the end I was pleased with a number of the drawings, I learnt new things about mark making and enjoyed experimenting with a huge variety of drawing materials.

Snowdrop White

Blood Red

Blue Monday

Blue Bottle

Thinking Outside the Box

This was the outcome from a week long illustration project. The brief was to create a book, but not a traditional cover and pages type creation, something unusual. With the theme Opposites.

I decided to illustrate the story of Pandora's box. 

Experimental life drawing

We didn't always just struggle on with charcoal trying to do detailed accurate representations of the life models; sometimes we mixed it up a little with exercises such as;

• Draw without using lines.
• Draw with a giant paintbrush.
• Draw without taking you hand off the paper.
• 30 second drawings.
• Draw moving models.
• Draw without taking your eyes off the model.
• Don't draw anything you can name.

Some of them were quite difficult, but you get a lot out of struggling through the exercises. They make you look at things in new ways and push your drawing ability further and in new directions.