Tasty Textures

Experimenting with textures was the subject for this class. My efforts look like a badly made variety pizza!. I glued string for the outlines and then painted and glued various texture mediums such as paper, coloured sand, acrylic texture paste and various sizes of beads and coloured stone. Not my greatest achievement but a lot of fun to do and that, at the end of the day, is what it is all about. I have also uploaded a video clip of may latest triumph in my sketchbook.

Paper engineering

Lots of fun....making the equivalent of pop-up cards. Unfortunately I left the results of my labours in the workshop so I hope someone finds it and keeps it until next week. I would like to try some more paper engineering as I found it very satisfying to do. I came across a web site the other day that had templates to to pop up buildings such as the Taj Mahal and the Potala palace....but I think I may need to get some practice at the basics before I try that. The web link to look at some brilliant models and also to download templates is http://members.shaw.ca/woa/newhome.htm.

As I cannot show a picture of my card I am showing some more pages from my Oak Tree sketch book. The page of leaves show examples of leaves made from silk paper, tissue paper, some bought artificial leaves and examples of stamped leaves. The other shows a photo of the branches of an oak tree with three areas selected to do line drawings to show the complexity of the way in which the branches grow.

Inspiration

There was no class last week as Betty was away. This week we had one-to-ones to assess our progress, discuss how our sketchbooks were progressing and discuss ideas for our second project which is a freestanding book. I have decided to do my in the form of a star book and using Buddhist symbols as the theme. I did a little rough model of a star book which I have downloaded above.
We also did some experimenting using Tyvek, which is a non-tearing material used for security envelopes. Pieces of pictures etc from glossy magazines were pasted onto a piece of Tyvek and this was covered with fine tissue paper. The glue was dried and the piece was ironed between sheets of baking parchment until the Tyvek had dissolved leaving just the tissue and the paper. I then decorated my piece with oil pastels and water colour. It can also be stitched. The effect was quite pleasing as the picture above shows. I am definitely going to use this technique again, possibly to make pieces to incorporate into collage.