First Prints.

For the past two weeks I've been dying up fabric and experimenting in the print room. 

I wanted to work with mono printing to begin with as I felt that this would be the best way to translate my drawings to print. 

I don't feel that my time so far in the print room has been very successful, the mono prints haven't come out as I'd have liked, the lines don't have the defined quality of my drawings. 

I've found that I've become distracted by process and colour again. Although I told myself I was going to stick to a few colours, dying up the backgrounds and working with different printing dyes has started to confuse me. 

I think that the best way to move on from this week is to go back to my drawings and pick out sections to then expose onto a screen. An exposed screen will hopefully give me the defined lines that I want to achieve. 

Monochrome Drawings.

Fig 1.

Since I've been focusing more on layout the past couple of weeks, I've been looking at Richard Long's paintings, as he uses defined shapes combined with the paint being allowed to drip and splash across the piece so is still very expressive, but with a sense of structure added. It's helped me to look at how other expressive artists lay their work out and think about composition, which I think is starting to come through in my own work this week. 

I set the aim of completing 25 drawings that explored different sets of marks to help refine my drawing and ideas.

I found this task to be very helpful, and worked well to focus my marks. I'm pleased with the body of marks generated, and feel I've created a large volume of inspiration for me to work with further in the print room. 

I think the more monochrome palette is working well, as I'm not thinking about colour and materials as much and purely thinking about what marks to create. I've also found masking off sections, in a way similar to Long,  to be effective against the expressive marks, it's quite dramatic to have a hard line in the middle to cut the marks off. 

Fig. 1 Richard Long (n.d) [Online] [Accessed on 12th November 2013] <http://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/368/richard-long/highlights-3783>

Ian McKeever.

I've been interested in Ian McKeever's work this week, I think it relates to some of the techniques i've been using as his paintings give the effect of illumination, with abstract forms and shapes layered up together. This is a similar effect that I want to achieve with marks and pattern. McKeever's palette is quite subtle, yet effective, the darker and tonal backgrounds really illuminate the white areas. This is something for me to think about, perhaps using a darker palette, with only small flashes of brighter areas.

Fig 1.

Fig 1. Ian McKeever (n.d) [Online] [Accessed on 11th November 2013] <http://www.ianmckeever.com/gallery/paintings.php?pg=5>

Layout and Marks.

Fig 1. 

This week I was inspired by Mark Rothko's paintings, mainly for his use of layering with colour to create illuminating effects. I've been thinking more about layout this week and how my marks can work in a piece without covering a whole surface. I decided to create another large scale drawings whilst taking into account how I could block sections and create areas of space as Rothko has done within his paintings.

This piece as a whole was far more successful than my previous large scale drawings, this was because I wasn't focusing on creating shapes any more and I was purely looking at marks, through which I've realised that I don't need to over work things, pieces can be simple and effective with just one mark repeated. I think it's also helped in this drawing to have areas of space and colour without marks, creating a sense of depth and illumination.  

Fig 1. Mark Rothko (n.d) [Online] [Accessed on 11th November 2013] <www.wikipaintings.org>

Large Scale Drawings.

                                     Fig 1.                                                                        Fig 2. 

This past few weeks I've really been working on upping the scale of my drawings. I created three large scale pieces, to test out different techniques and colour ranges.  

I don't think the all over pattern worked too well as shown in Fig 1, as it started to become more like a geometric structure, which isn't the effect I want to achieve, I feel that focusing on more flowing shapes and marks to create a more natural and organic feel is more appropriate to my concept. 

For this reason I am happier with the drawing shown in Fig 2 as it is a more flowing structure. I think that the colours are working well in this piece, and the illuminating effect has really worked in areas. Working on a lot larger scale has helped to free my mark making up and create more flowing lines, creating a more natural feel. 

                                 Fig 3                                                                           Fig 4

I decided to up the scale further to get a feel for the scale of an interior context shown in Fig 4. 

I found working to this scale to be quite daunting. I ended up getting hung up on how the shapes needed to form, leading them to become very leaf like which wasn't the effect I originally wanted to achieve. I wanted the marks to create new forms and shapes without me forcing them into one particular shape in repeat, there needs to more of an organic feel to my drawings. To work on from this, I will focus purely on the marks from my photographs, and start to think about adding space around the shapes as filling the whole page is too much. The techniques and colours I'm using also need to be brought back as I'm trying to use too many colours and techniques in one piece. 

In Fig 3 I found that adding the cut out layer on top of the banner style drawing really helped to create space and depth, something that I want to continue experimenting with, especially in the print room with techniques such as devore.