Updates

Well it's been a while since I blogged as I've been really busy with finishing up my foundation course. Above is a picture taken at The BCTF in Harrogate and shows my printed scarves hanging up on their display board.

The show went really well and there was a lot of interest in my work, which was really pleasing.

After the BCTF I then helped organise and plan our end of year show within the college. We had to rearrange our working areas and completely paint mostly everything in order for it to look perfect. And I have to say it did look pretty good when it was all done. The picture below shows my area with my scarves, embroidered textile prints, 2D prints and my sketchbooks.



Through exhibiting at the BCTF I have been asked to supply some of my scarves to a Christmas Craft Fair called Bedazzled, which is taking place in the gallery of Bradford College later this year. I have been designing some new prints to use and have two new ideas.


This image above is a rough drawing of an adaptation of Cherry Blossom which is going to be one of the new designs. The other design is a seed head print that I had drawn in a sketchbook a couple of years back and have wanted to use for a while, but never got chance. I think they both will make perfect scarf prints and can't wait to get them printed up.

Neckerchief number two - design process

These are my sketched sushi images for neckerchief design number 2. I'm going to be scanning these in later and importing them into Illustrator to make up a repeat pattern. I'll post a pic of this when I have it.

New artwork for Dalot

Last year I designed some artwork for a friends ep. Since this time Maria (Dalot) has moved to New York and also has a record company. So I updated the artwork for the new ep. Above is the template for the new ep with my artwork laid out. The images I used are all hand drawn by myself, scanned in and just placed in Photoshop. I believe this is going to print soon, hopefully it all turns out well and I wish her all the best with it.

Preparing to show at British Craft Trade Fair - April

So I haven't updated for a while. Been a bit slack, but now I've got my new phone it's a lot easier to document things and get them straight onto my MacBook.

At the moment I am designing and printing some neckerchiefs to show at the British Craft Trade Fair in April.

I'm at the stage of printing the first and designing the second and third.



This first and second photo below are me preparing the screen for printing. There were a few areas that needed to be 'stopped' out so they wouldn't print. These were areas such as where the acetate had sat together causing a line on the screen. This took about 20 mins to do.




After stopping out I had to use brown tape to tape around the area to print. This is to stop the ink going through the screen and onto the print bed. It also protects the print area on the right which is my black colour. (You need separate images and prints for each colour that you are printing, this first print is the sole colour on my print)


To test the print I am first of all printing onto paper, before printing onto my fabric. Below is the first colour being printed.


First colour on paper;


This is the paper print with both colour and black;


Here is my first colour being printed onto fabric. I've gone for a really bright pink which I think will sit well with the black.


As well as pink I also printed purple. I found that the first colour added shrunk the fabric so my black would not match up completely. This is something to try and sort out when I next print on tues. Either I will have to fill in the gaps or possibly look to using another fabric that will not shrink.

These shots are pink and purple flowers both with black printed;

August 12th

There were three exhibitions I wanted to see in London while I was on my 'summer hols.' But what with work commitments and money (not having much of it) I've had to settle for getting down to see one.

On the 12th of August I'm going down to London for the day to see Psycho Buildings at The Hayward. I'm really, really excited. It sounds fantastic. Only down side to going down is having to go on my own. It would have been nice to experience the exhibition with someone else so I could talk about it and share it. I will be taking my camera, I'm hoping they allow photographs.

Watch this space as I'll definitely be writing this visit up.


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Sketches

These are sketches I did at the weekend with watercolour pencil. I'd really like to take these further and possibly do larger scale acrylic paintings. First of all I think I'm going to develop the sketches further.

The wall hanging

This first image shows some of the inspiration behind my wall hanging. I've collected all sorts of different items that I want to weave into the hanging. Here you can see thread, buttons and beads. As well as buying oddments of material, I've tried to where I can use found items including feathers, silver pieces and broken brooch's.


The second image is a close-up of the M.A.C postcards. I like the layering in the photo's, the way they have used lace, feathers and jewellery. The fine features of the models accentuate their femininity, and give them an ethereal quality.


Starting to weave. I had sat and cut material into strips to weave in between the chicken wire, which would be the base of the wall hanging. I have an idea in my mind of how I would like the wall hanging to look. I decided I wanted to use certain colours so everything would tie together, because I want the piece to work as a whole. A lot of the placement of the strips of material is down to how I feel at the time, I have no set plan of where I want everything to go. Just an idea of how I would like the finished item to look.


This final image is all of the green strips woven onto the chicken wire. I decided this colour would be the base, forming a backdrop for the rest of the colours to be woven in, which will be more sporadic, and not as evenly placed. One difficulty of using chicken wire is how bendy it is. You have to make sure you place a lot of magazines onto it to keep it flat. Eventually it will stay relatively flat which makes it easier. Chicken wire also isn't great to lean on and you have to watch out for the sharp edges.

The weaving currently is much more advanced then these pictures show. I have a number of colours and textures woven in, and everything is really beginning to take shape. Although there is still a long way to go. I will be adding more up to date pictures of the progress soon.