Continuing on with my art journaling course, Wanderlust 2022, we’ve been concentrating on using artist acrylics for the past 7 weeks. It’s been interesting to revise colour mixing and use ‘proper’ acrylics with their better opacity. There’s a self-portrait, a mini Gelli-printed art journal, a homage to my favourite artist and some collage and glazing. Here’s what I produced…
This is the last post based on my end-of-first-year exhibition pieces. Today’s is the graphics and illustration project – we had four sessions to create a collage based on the portrait and work of our chosen artist. I developed several collages, based on thumbnail images of the myriad works of Jacek Yerka, courtesy of a Google search. The two I chose to take forward were a simple cut and paste montage of as many thumbnails that would fit on an A4 sheet, and a number of thumbnails mounted on acetate hoops circling an image of the artist photocopied from one of his books (to represent his images being inspired by his dreams). I then researched and mocked up a magazine cover and article (based on Artists and Illustrators March 2012 magazine) and a book cover dust jacket using a photo of the 3D whirling dreams montage and a scan of the A4 montage.
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 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.
Our theme across all our activities this term at college is ‘influenced by an artist’. I’ve chosen the Polish surrealist Jacek Yerka to base my work on, and for print I was asked to do a drypoint. I discovered this is an etching process where the ink is trapped in the grooves and burrs made by scratching onto metal or acrylic and then transferred onto the substrate using pressure. I scratched my drawing onto a sheet of clear acrylic sheet (approx. A5 size), applied etching ink (which is very viscous), removed most of it, and then printed onto previously wetted watercolour paper using an etching press. Any ink left on the acrylic gets transferred to the paper, so removing it from where you don’t want it is quite laborious! I was sooooo excited as the first print was revealed, and that didn’t really diminish as I did a limited print run. I’m going to have a go replicating it at home using one of the many die cutting machines in place of the etching press, and more common crafting inks. Here is the basic print, and I’ll be colour washing some in due course:
