Self- Made Collage and Mark Making Book

The idea here was to create a book which we would stitch together ourselves, and use various papers to work on. Papers could be from anywhere and could be anything. For instance tracing paper, paper from envelopes, brown paper, wrapping paper, magazine paper, and even materials such as bubble wrap that we could work on. With these papers, we were instructed to create different effects by folding, marking, pleating, scrunching, tearing, bleaching and anything else we could think to do to create unusual and interesting pages for our books. We could then take the pages further by adding drawings or collages or little works of art to create the books. The photographs here show the pages from my book from start to finish.

I really enjoyed creating this book. I was able to be very experimental and free myself up to create ideas for my pages, and I loved being able to use a huge range of materials in various different ways to create completely different ideas from one page to the next.

Print and Dye

The images shown here all display the samples I produced in our four weeks of print and dye. During our time there, we were able to experiment with techniques such as heat transfer, dye baths, screen printing and Shibori. Before this time, I had never done any of these things before, and I loved discovering all the different ways of printing and dyeing fabrics. I didn’t know what to expect before every session so I didn’t prepare myself as well as I could have done, therefore my samples are all quite random and I had to come up with simple design ideas very quickly to begin working on the techniques. I am however pleased with my designs and I enjoyed experimenting and coming up with ideas as I was going along. I feel that overall the work I produced during these weeks was successful and I am happy with my finished samples.

Collage and Mark-Making Ideas

These pieces of work were produced during our Monday drawing sessions when we were working with colour and wet media and collage. This time gave me the chance to experiment freely with wet media and materials, and to use techniques I wouldn’t have thought of using before. I found these weeks very valuable as I learnt a great deal, and I’m happy with the ideas and work I produced during this time.

Screen Printing

IMG_4033During my time in the print and dye workshop, we were able to experiment with screen printing. This is the result of my experimentation in this area. I wanted to create a simple print just to try out the technique and to see how the colours came out, so I used simple lines and shapes to make this design. I am quite happy with this design even though it was just for experimentation, and I learned that while painting on to the screen, colours can bleed. This could be a positive or a negative feature for a design, but here I am pleased that it did this as it added to the effect of the print. I would love to try this technique again but what I would change is firstly, definitely the fabric. I don’t like how the colours have come out slightly faded, and with the colour of the fabric, I think it makes this look very dull. I’d like to use a much whiter fabric to try and avoid this, and also one more flowing, rather than a stiffer one like this Calico. I think this experiment was very successful giving that I had never done anything like this before. I also feel that because I have learned a new technique, I have a greater range to choose from when it comes to creating my artworks in the future.