This is another of my end-of-first-year exhibition pieces, this time for the four week still life module. It is white oil pastel and graphite on black paper, and took around four hours to complete. The items were all drawn separately and then grouped together for the piece with a single light source chosen. It was an exercise in creating ellipses which I now know are circles drawn in perspective!
As regular readers will know by now, the last term’s work at college has been based on an artist of our choosing – mine is the Polish fantasy/surrealist Jacek Yerka. For our ceramics module this term we had to design and make a functional teapot based on our artist’s work.
This first image shows my three designs that reached maquette stage: I dubbed them ‘Time Flies’, ‘Town in a Teacup’ and ‘Brontosaurus Civitas’ – click on the links to see the original images on which they are based.
As you can see, it was worth doing the test run, as the Brontosaurus exploded on firing as I’d not left a big enough hole leading to the pot void… All would make functional tea pots, with the ring pot being the most striking, but trickiest to make. I decided to go for the quickest to make, and my original idea, as time was limited to get the pot finished, fired and glazed before exhibition night. Here’s the final pot – a little on the large size to be practical, but fully functional. The town is a close fitting lid, and decorated with various oxides. The main pot is internally glazed and decorated with slips and part glazed to give the impression of the monster being in water with cliffs leading up to the town. I think I prefer working small, as I’m far happier with the town than the pot!
It’s my turn over at the WOW! Embossing Powder design team blog again this week, and I have been set the task of using their fabulous flocks. I chose to decorate an inexpensive Swedish square based tall glass vase and here’s the result. Details here.
As promised in a previous post, here are two more pieces that I exhibited at my end of year show last week. These are life drawings of the same model – the first is my first attempt at using oil paints with a palette knife and was completed in around an hour (we had to work really quickly!). I was trying to emulate the style of David Bomberg.
The second was a two week pose, with around 2.5 hours drawing time – the first week I drew the outline and shaded with the colour soft pastels before sealing it with spray fixative. The second week I worked on developing the shading with charcoal and spray fixative only, rubbing back with sandpaper and layering and layering to get the darkest tones. I’d chosen Jim Dine as my influencing artist for this term’s work, and tried to emulate his way of working in this piece.
Many thanks to our model for her patience, and for her permission to share my drawings of her.
I snuck a few minutes in the craft room this morning to tidy up, and managed to play with my new Summer Distress Inks from Ranger. They are really bright hues, reminiscent of Dyan Reaveley’s colour palette, but as with all the other distress ink seasonal ranges, they play nicely together. I combined them with Perfect Pearls from the Jewels kit and the perfect splatter technique I learnt in Creative Chemistry 101 to make this tag. The embossing is Metallic Gold Rich Super Fine from WOW! Embossing Powders.
It’s been a while again since I’ve posted – I’ve been busy finishing off end of year projects at college, culminating in our exhibition last night. Here’s just one of my pieces (I’ll share some more in a couple of days), for the final mixed media module, inspired by the work of Jacek Yerka, my ‘chosen’ artist for this term.
I have been creating, honest! I just can’t share some of what I have been doing due to commercial sensitivities, but as soon as I can, I will… and some of my creativity is on projects that are taking just that little bit longer to complete.
But I can share these two tags that I have done for this month’s Manic Stamper Craft Club, continuing my series of Twelve Tags for 2012. The first features triple embossing and a smidge of the frosted window technique for the ripples, as well as paper crafted water lilies. The second is napkin decoupage with a stamped and coloured image artfully placed on top. Fuller instructions will follow on the Manic Stamper blog once term has finished!
I’ve been away from the computer for a little while – last weekend was doing the Yorkshire Three Peaks for the first time, and this weekend I was meeting up with some of the team down at WOW! Embossing Powder HQ. I’ve also been working on some hush hush commissioned work, which with college work has left little time for playing. I did manage to squeeze in some quality time with my embossing powders though to reprise my June Twelve Tags of 2012 tag in embossing powders. For more details on how I did it, pop over to the WOW! Embossing Powder blog.
As I mentioned in my original post, I planned to further work on my drypoint prints, adding tone and colour. Here is a gallery of the results – and the bottom right is the print I have given away, number 13 of 15 – and may be the winner will want colour added? Most of these are now mounted for the end of term exhibition. There are some other prints available to purchase if you’d be interested…
I think some work better than others – I’m not happy with the tea dye one, it’s too dark. I am happy with the greyscale/monotone trees with the colour window. The pastel is very much in keeping with Jacek Yerka’s work on which this is loosely based as he prepares his paintings with a pastel version first. Let me know what you think 🙂
As promised, the draw for my 100,000 views giveaway closed last night. Twenty six people have left comments in the last week, with one late entry from Suzanne that didn’t quite make the deadline – thank you all for your feedback and support!
I used random.org to select the winners, and first out of the electronic hat was Rachel, who will get the set of WOW! embossing powders in their handy carry case, and second out of the electronic hat was Kaye, who gets one of my limited edition prints. Congratulations to the winners – please check your emails!
And roll on my next giveaway at 250,000 views 😉
But before that there will be a giveaway in honour of my 100th tangle pattern – yes, there will be more…