Hue & Dye - Debbie's OCA Textiles Blog: Assignment 2 - Project 4 - Developing Design Ideas - Stage 2

Looking for Shapes and Drawing
Exercise 2 and 3

I found this exercise really enjoyable so I extended this exercise using a number of images, experimenting with different media. I chose some very different subjects to explore how nature, technology and art could all be used as inspiration to develop future work.

This first series is based on a painting by Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka. She has a very distinctive style, firmly set in the Art Deco era, with strong contrasts, limited colour palette, strong lines and very striking poses for her subjects.

It was an interesting challenge selecting part of the human body to interpret into pattern and here's what I did with it:

Top left is coloured pencil, top right pencil and bottom is pen and ink. Of the drawings, the most identifiable as a human (!) is the coloured pencil drawing, largely, I imagine, because we can related these colours readily to the familiar tones of the human face.

The pencil and pen and ink sketches, on the other hand, especially when viewed in isolation (and if you had no knowledge of the image source) are much less obviously human features. They becoming interesting shapes rather than looking like an image taken from a viewing frame!

I was intrigued by this so tried something even more distinctive - the eyes. I deliberately chose an odd angle to see how quickly the mind ceased to recognise the image as human features, working again in coloured pencil, pencil and ink.

Again, once translated into pencil and ink, the image loses its human-like qualities and is broken down into simply pattern, shape and structure.

I went on to find a completely different postcard, a classic sunset over the sea from Cornwall.

I chose two areas to use as my inspiration.

These were the images I created by interepreting the selected areas, again using three different media, coloured pencil, pencil and oil pastels. On reflection, the lines in the original image weren't as interesting as I first thought and this wasn't as successful for me. Of the different interpretations, the simple pencil drawing is the most promising for future work.

Industrial imagery next. An image selected from a beautiful Art Deco gate, taken from the book that accompanied the amazing Art Deco exhibition (sponsored by my erstwhile employer) at the V&A. This was a very detailed, "busy" image so I wasn't sure how easy it would be to break it down into a format that could be re-used, but in the end I felt it had a lot of promise.

My interpretations were in gouache, natural dye ink, charcoal and pencil.

I also found these fascinating corals while researching for another project. The images were a bit small so haven't photographed too well, but they give the idea of what I was working from. By complete accident I was laying these out on some bright coloured funky foam which produced some very interesting effects when changing the background colour between different shades of the foam (pics in my sketchbook album).