A New Course

What are the chances of this?! I signed up for a course with no idea who the tutor was only to find it's Louise Baldwin whose work I adore. The course explores mixed media approaches to surface design with textiles. Less emphasis on stitch and more on the surface, which is new to me.

So there's lots of mucking about with paint and dyes and gluing things together. Like being back at primary school.

The theme is birds, which can be interpreted to be anything - feathers, eggs, murmurations, nests, flocks etc. Again, this might seem obvious to a natural artist but I'm having to learn how to take one word or idea and let it run to a place that I'm interested in. And that the interesting new place might be something I'd never imagined would grab my attention.

Here was the first exercise we did. Looking at mark-making, textures, composition and colour.

Using a magazine picture as inspiration for colour mixing I came up with this first which I didn't like

Same idea, using a magazine picture to pick a colour palette and trying out different mark making techniques

Rubbings with a graphite block

We then cut our sheets of painted paper up to join things together. Interestingly if there is something you've done that you don't like, for instance my first example above, try cutting a piece out of it to see if it appears different at a different scale.

Collage of mark-making and colour

I'll let you know how other classes go on this course as I've got a feeling I'll be pushing the boat out and learning all sorts of new techniques.

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This post is part of a series: this is Part I -- see Part II -- see Part III
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