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.

Print Outcomes.

Martha Dryden Legg Dad
Bessie & Norman
Hubby Martha-Louise

I am truly delighted with the way these have turned out and frankly rather embarrassed by the number of oos and aahs they are provoking in the studio but, I suppose that helps me to evaluate them less subjectively. I pinned them up on the wall next to my studio space (they’ll take ages to dry and the drying rack is full). I must admit, I was quite startled by seeing them from the outside of the studio window when I was stuck at the traffic lights this morning. The series certainly seems to have impact.

A startling array.

Never mind how startled I was, …… nothing compared to my husband’s face (no clue about the prints in production) when his image suddenly appeared on Instagram! #foundation.carlisle

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Production line ? #printmaking

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#printmaking ? #UALAwardingBody

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Quite surprising to see yourself like this online!

Extension Activities.

  1. I have been asked (told) to think about how one might mount/present/hang these, following a lengthy but spontaneous ‘crit’ with PT and KT about them.
  2. Learning the force of ‘the hovering hand’ : KT has found it difficult to restrain herself from ‘dabbling’ in this print process ha! ha! Oh well there you go – the down-side of teaching lol. But words emanated from the mind that was controlling ‘the hovering hand’ and her comments resulted in me doing some ‘scrapping’ off the ‘spent’ printing plates – sort of frottaging bits of them with a baren.

This playful extension may have been a bit inspired by the frottage I did of each board before printing from them. It seemed a nice way to preserve the virgin plates in a bit more interesting way than captures from the photocopy platen.

‘Frottage’ – what an hilarious word.