Module 4 Chapter 4

Scraffito

Before I started on this chapter I had a look at the artists you recommended.  My favourite was Heeseop Yoon and I have chosen this picture to keep in my sketchbook.

This is produced using black tape wound round the pillars and stuck to the walls.  I think the pillars are her own and I assume the tape is actually stuck to a background and then attached to the walls, otherwise, it could get messy.

I have also been back to my original drawing of the goldfinch and have photocopied the one I put tone into and have now added some texture.  At least I think that is what it looks like.

I don't know if you can see it very well but it does look sharper than the original.  I used a drawing pen number 2 to add feathers and make the seed head spikier.

4.4.1.

I am not a lover of scraffito, I never feel it works very well for me.  However, I am quite pleased with some of these pieces.

This was my first try using oil pastels and gouache over the top.  The gouache scraped off fairly well and the colours came through OK.  The instructions say that dark over light colours works best so I had to have a go at the other way round.

I thought this worked really well.  Black and red oil pastel with white gouache over the top.  The white gouache scraped away really well so I was quite pleased with the result.  I washed the paper with Koh-i-Noor before doing anything else.

I was quite keen now so I prepared a page with oil pastel and black gouache to make a copy of one of my drawings from a previous chapter.

I didn't get back to this page for a couple of weeks and the gouache seemed to have dried hard and I found it quite difficult to scrape off.  The flash on the camera has made the blue light up and it looks really nice, in fact the whole page looks better here than in my book.

I then tried various other mediums to see how they worked.

I've used pencil crayon with inktense over, inktense with gouache, markel stick and gouache, oil pastel with oil pastel, oil pastel and acrylic, oil pastel and emulsion paint, inktense and acrylic, inktense and inktense, and water soluble crayon and acrylic.

'Greasier' mediums work best as the base colour, gouache and acrylic work best over the top.  Two oilier colours on top of each other tend to just blend together rather than scrape away.  I used a toothpick for all the scraping.

Finally I went back to my goldfinch and using inktense and acrylic I coloured in the outline drawing I had done earlier (photocopied).  I used inktense and acrylic paint and where the bird has black patches I used a dark green.

His colouring is a bit unusual for a goldfinch but I do quite like him.  I added the leg afterwards with a felt tip pen and did a light wash of green watercolour over the whole page.

As I said, this isn't my favourite medium but I am quite pleased with what I have achieved.  However, I don't know if I will ever use it but you never know, one day this effect might be just what I am looking for.

Chapter 3. Drawing Texture

I had been down into the woods nearby and collected some leaves for a piece of work I was doing so the first wax rubbing I did was of some of those leaves.

These are all done with oil pastels and number 1 is on soft packaging paper, number 2 on a soft fabric type of paper and number three is tissue paper.
Then I started looking round the house for different textures.

This one is a wallpaper all done with oil pastels. Number 1 is tissue paper, number 2 is soft fabric paper overwashed with Koh-i-Noor and number three is packing paper also overwashed with Koh-i-Noor.

All the overwashes I have done have been with Koh-i-Noor.  1 and 2 on this page are a different wallpaper using tissue paper and the soft fabric paper.  The three small rubbings are from a wood type material I found in the pot-pourri bowl.  The two blue ones are on tissue paper using the top and the bottom of the wood and the third piece is on the soft fabric paper.

Top of the page is a rubbing from the corrugated card that is in the oil pastel box, done on packaging paper which was already creased.  Left to right on the bottom three is lace with oil pastel on soft fabric paper and tissue paper.  The third piece is wax crayon on soft fabric paper which doesn't give as clear a rubbing.

The top one is a rubbing of a piece of embroidery using oil pastel on soft fabric paper.  The bottom one is a metal grid in Brompton church using oil pastel and soft fabric paper.
I had found myself stewarding a textile exhibition in the church and to pass the time I took advantage of having different surfaces to take rubbings from.

This is a rubbing of the bark of one of the trees in the churchyard.  Oil pastel and soft paper.

The top rubbing is from the side of my pencil pot on my desk.  I love this wood pot and these elephants are on all four sides.  The other rubbing is from the end of a pew in the church. On both of these I have used markel stick and the bottom one has a wash of Koh-i-Noor over it.  I am more pleased with this one now as it  was very pale and had no definition until I put the wash over it.

These two are both stonework at the church.  the bottom one is oil pastel on tissue paper and you can see there was a carving in the stonework.  The top coloured one is markel stick on packaging paper.

The top one is a piece of paving stone and the bottom one is stonework both from the church..  The top is again markel stick on packaging paper but with a different coloured wash which is a bit more subtle.  The bottom one is oil pastel on newspaper.  I quite like the effect on this one.

This is my favourite rubbing.  It is the same piece of paving stone outside the church door as the rubbing above but it has come out so much better on tissue paper. I have used Markel stick  with no added wash.
I will have to keep this carefully so as not to tear or crease it as I think I have an idea for a piece of work from it.

Activity 4.3.3
I also used this image of the paving stone to make a drawing of the texture patterns.

This was a drawing of the bark of a redwood tree in California. I took one of the simple shapes and made a stamp to finish off the page.

This was round the base of the font in my local church.  I imagine it is centuries of feet kicking against it that has worn these marks and patterns.

This stonework is amazing and is from Whitby Abbey.  At first I thought it was old gargoyles that had fallen down and been stacked together but it isn't.  The wind and weather has worn the stone to look like lots of faces.

This is a photograph my sister sent me of funghi growing in a tree.  It has some amazing shapes and patterns although I don't feel I have captured them well.  The dark spots are because I closed the book before the paint on the other page was dry.

Activity 4.3.2

Sorry this is out of order but I wanted the paving to all follow on.  I could fill this blog with all the photographs of texture and pattern I have taken over the years.  My daughter says it is embarrassing when everyone else is photographing the view but I have my back to it taking pictures of rocks and tree bark.  Here are just a few.

Ripley Castle

 The village pinfold.

 Leaves in Raincliffe Woods.

 Sulphur springs in Iceland

 Nets and ropes on Scarborough sea front.

I've enjoyed this chapter.  I love texture and always look for ways of including it in my work.  Usually I just look at pictures or photographs and try to memorise what I have seen.  I never thought to draw the texture which I found quite difficult on some things but even if it is not accurate it gives a good impression.

Module 4 Chapters 1 & 2

I have put together chapters one and two because I found it easier to work on one drawing and carrying straight on to put the detail in.
I started with this drawing of a goldfinch which is in the book I am planning to alter.

I drew the bird and then I drew this broken fence which is also in the book but as I was at the art club at the time I didn't photocopy it in black and white.

I wasn't too happy with my pictures and I felt a bit constrained with the size of the drawing I was having to produce due to the squares.  So I drew larger squares on the next page.

This was better but then I found another picture of a goldfinch in my bird book.

I thought this was a clearer picture so I copied it and drew it, this time properly following the instructions in the course which was to just do an outline.

I was pleased with this and drew it again this time putting in all the shading.

Feeling more confident with the larger squares on the paper, I then went back to the fence.

This was my outline drawing, hope you can see it OK.

Then I went on to do the shading.  I have done all these seperately so I still have the original drawings to go back to.

I then got a bit over confident and tried to do a building.  I love buildings but have real difficulty with the perspective of them.  I chose this painting of a church.

Done on the smaller squares, this doesn't look quite right, I've got too much curve on the left wall and somehow the whole thing looks fatter but it doesn't take up anymore room on the grid than the original.

As I thought I could work better drawing larger, I did this again with larger squares but the result isn't any better, I had real trouble fitting it into the squares.  I might give up on buildings and stick to fences.

I thought I had better try out a flower as they may be included in my book.

I did this first attempt on smaller squares in the corner of a page.  I forgot the butterfly somehow otherwise it wasn't too bad.

This is a larger outline, again not too bad.

Not so pleased with this one.  I tried to do the background with hatching but it is a bit heavy for the picture.  Also, I haven't got the inward curve of the petals on the flower.  I tried using the rubber to create the white lines in the picture but it didn't really show up so I think that is where I lost my curve.

These drawings are quite good for me.  I have never considered my self as a person who can draw.  I am quite pleased with the goldfinch and the fence.  Interestingly these two were drawn sitting at a table at the art club and the others were drawn sitting on the settee at home, so maybe my position wasn't as good as it should be.

Module 3 Chapter 10

Looking at David Hockney and Friedensreich Hundertwasser

I chose the lower of David Hockney's paintings because it is one I didn't know and I liked the colours, they are a bit different for him.  The top one is well known and the perspective just makes you want to walk that track.
I hadn't heard of Hundertwasser and was amazed at his buildings.  When I first looked I wasn't sure if they were real buildings or just paintings so I had to choose one for my book.  The lower painting is a cityscape and reminds me of Klimt with all the little blocks of pattern.

Creating a customised sketchbook.

I must have had an interest in geology even when I was quite young as I have a very old Observers Book of Geology which I know I bought for myself.  I recently visited the Rotunda Museum in Scarborough which is entirely devoted to geology and I bought a book about the Yorkshire coastline, known as the Dinosaur Coast (I think you have one down in the south west as well).  I decided to make my own book about the dinosaur coast to cement my knowledge and hopefully file it in my brain where I can find it again some day.

All the paper is painted wallpaper lining paper, and I chose to do a stab stitch book as I wasn't sure how many pages I was going to do and I could easily do them in any order.

I started with my two books and an old atlas by the Readers Digest that has a lot of information about the earth.

At a recent paper making workshop, I made two pieces of paper with Kozo fibres embedded in them and I thought one of them looked a bit like a dinosaur footprint so I used that for my front cover.

My first page is showing the ages of the earth with an extending paper attached at the top.  The extension is machined on at the bottom of the page to look like black lines.

The next two pages are flaps.  The left hand side is a set of little maps showing where the various mining industries were sited as well as the Lower Jurassic rock and the plant fossil beds are.  The two ichthyosaurs are glued at the tail and can be lifted to see the plesiosaurs underneath.  All the flaps are glued in.

The next two pages are about Whitby.  The extended page is stitched in and unfolds in two movements.  The first is to demonstrate the difference in height of the two cliffs and the second is to show the opening between the two where the river Esk flows out to see and the ships sail into the harbour. Hopefully you can see my ship.

The next two pages are Robin Hood's Bay and Ravenscar.  The photograph just folds out to show the bay and the painted page has been cut into a circular shape to enhance how the bay has been formed.

The next double page takes us to the Middle Jurassic period and the Jurassic jungle. I have used the reverse of the circular page to paint the jungle on.

The next double page is still at Ravenscar and the Peak Fault.  This explains how the land has split in two at the headland forming an outcrop of Jurassic sandstone about 500 metres long.  I have demonstrated this with and extra point of paper glued in after the book was stitched together.  It needs a little help to pop out when you turn the page.

We now move on to Scarborough and a photograph of the town folded in to fit the page.  On the second page is an added flap to show how the cliff has formed.  This was also glued in.

The next two pages move on to the Upper Jurassic period and Filey Bay.  This shows how oil reservoirs are formed and when you lift the flap you have a picture of a rig.

The last double page is a painted map of the rocks and landscape of the area and was done seperately and glued in when the book was finished. The bottom folds up to fit the book.

On the back page is my bibliography and the back cover is the other piece of hand made paper.

I hope this is what was required for the course.  I know it wasn't a topic from design sources as such and I have used other publications to provide my information but the line drawings seemed to fit so well into extended pages and I have enjoyed doing it. I feel a child might enjoy looking and playing with this book.