A little time to spare…

I seem to have worked really hard this week – very productive….. research, sketch-booking, making the animation, following-up on some of the contextual studies pointers we’ve been given and still a little time to spare before rolling the dice for next week’s chance selections. So, I decided to play around with some kale (the plant life idea continuing…) and make a brain out of it. The idea harks back to contextual drawing we did last half term when we had to bring a tool and a piece of food to college. One of the tasks was “use the food to ‘draw’ the tool then use the tool to ‘draw’ the food.” It was a really great activity and I got some lovely results drawing (painting & printing actually) with the kale I had taken in. I thought I’d revisit this.

I boiled the kale and reduced the liquid a bit having decided to use the liquor as my medium just to push the ‘plant life’ aspect of the experiment even further. I used this to tint paper by splattering the reduction off another kale leaf. Also, I did some printing from the leaves using a wash of purple and green water colour and worked into the results with oil pastel. While I was busy ‘Purple Haze’ came to mind which is rather apt considering the ‘mind theme’ so I have collaged the papers and prints and some photos into my sketch book with the Hendrix lyrics.

Making media and colouring papers. The purple kale liquor turns green over time – a gorgeous, topical, chance result.

‘Purple haze in my brain, lately things don’t seem the same, Actin’ funny but I don’t know why. Excuse me while I touch the sky’.

And finally …. making a miniature tunnel book sort of thing (in an old ring box) of the purple hazed mind.

The lid …. layers. Inside……. cut aways.