Primary Colour Collages

My year 7 art class made these primary colour collages a few weeks ago. I forgot to photograph them before being laminated a stapled to a display board. As a result, the photos have reflections on them and are very oddly cropped. Hopefully you can still get an idea of the great work the students did.

As always, I can't put names on the students work for school privacy reasons.

Papermaking workshop photos continued...

In my last post I  shared some photos from a papermaking workshop I held several years ago. The last post showed the equipment, some of the pulps, etc. This post shows some of the examples of the actual work produced by the students. 

I still can't believe it has taken me nearly 2 years to be able to find these photos.

Papermaking workshop photos

I just found some photos from a papermaking workshop I ran a few years ago. I had always planned to publish them on here but when my computer died a few years earlier I thought I had lost them. I just found a copy on an old portable hard drive. It reminds me of the importance of backing up your work. I will post a whole pile of the photos (yes I'm biased) but I think there are some really great ones.

I haven't taught papermaking since this last workshop as there is a huge amount of preparation needed. Maybe one day I'll teach another one.

The photos shown were a 4 day workshop that included a whole range of papermaking techniques.

Some of the equipment for the day

Some of the additional plant products I provided for adding to the paper pulp

The room setup with vats everywhere.

Tubs of cross shredded paper waiting to be processed.

White paper pulp with dye squirted on top- yet to be mixed

Some of the many sheets drying.

I''m the guest speaker at an upcoming exhibition

I've been invited by the 2012 Certificate IV students from Marden Senior College to open their upcoming art exhibition called 'Creative Fusion'. 

Below is the invite along with a little blurb about the exhibition. 

      Creative Fusion (Marden Senior College)

     Painting & Textile Art Works by Marden Senior College Graduates

      2 - 26 April 2013

Address: Phone: Fax:

558 Magill Rd, Magill (Corner Pepper St & Magill Rd) (08) 8364 6154 (08) 8332 3164

Email: Open Hours:

pepperstreet@burnside.sa.gov.au Tuesday to Saturday 12 noon - 5pm Find us on Facebook

Paper dresses

I absolutely adore the work of Elisabeth Lecour from London and thought I would share some of her work wit you all. She uses old maps to make the most gorgeous dresses. I have so many old maps I keep holding onto, just waiting for that perfect project one day.

This is the link  http://www.elisabethlecourt.com/works/les-robes-geographiques/

Teacup and teapot collages

A few weeks ago my gorgeous Year 9 girls finished off their teacup/teapot collages. The year 9's were also working on the Alice in Wonderland idea of the mad hatters tea party.

The class started off by doing blind contour and continuous line drawings of teacups and teapots. We then moved on to learning about realistic drawing of teacups and teapots. Students then worked out a composition they liked and set about collaging on top of their drawing. Paints were then applied and black pen for final details. Some of the results are below. I will post detailed step by step photos of the process in a future post.

I love the one above for its creativity.

I know I shouldn't have favourites but the one above is absolutely divine.

Paper collection

I was cleaning in my studio last week and found some of my paper collection. Over the years I have bought pieces of paper always intending to use them for something. As with lots of my collections, I never actually use the items and they just get stored away. The images below are of just a few of the papers I have waiting to be used.

Storage of ideas

I constantly have a collection of random items that give me ideas for artworks. A lot of them are 2-dimensional objects and so they can be stored together. Initially I would keep magazine clippings, newspaper articles, photocopies from books, free postcards, etc. in little piles all over my studio.  I then found these fantastic zip lock pockets that are really strong and great for storage. I now store all my little bits of paper in one of these pockets along with a sketchbook to put them into when I get a chance.

I have an obsession with drawing borders around everything in my sketchbooks. Below is what the inside of one of my idea sketchbooks looks like. Sometimes I will write comments or ideas next to the pictures. At other times it is purely just images.

My favorite picture on these pages is the one of the beer 

bottles wearing the jumpers.

The images above are of my zip up bag I use. It is made of plastic but is 

reinforced with an internal mesh so it is very strong.

Orizomegami

Orizomegami is the Japanese art of decorating papers by a method of folding and dipping them into dye. It is almost a mix of Origami (the paper folding part) and tie dying. Below is a diagram from a book I photocopied about 10 years ago (have no idea what the book was anymore sorry) and a couple of photos of my dyeing work that I used as samples with my students. 


Now we have finished dyeing our papers we are using them to make covers for accordion bound books. 

Paper experiments

I've been doing some experiments with quite thick brown paper as an idea for the exhibition I want to work towards. I scrunched up the paper so that I 'broke' the waxy sort of surface, I then painted it with cold tea. Below are the results, I can see real potential in these.