Shapes

I found these very soothing to cut. Especially the squares above. I have found out in the last few years that I really like squares. After I pasted the pieces, I noticed the top one looks like a monkey. Can you see it? The rectangles were my first ones to cut and I didn't like the shape so much. But I see how I can make squares out of them.
My leaves resemble footballs or is it because we watched football yesterday. Now to expand or shrink some of these.

Printing Blocks

Blocks were made from childrens "funky foam" mounted onto foam core board, have always found this the easiest way to make printing blocks.
Wrestled with my fear of white paper and after printing into pre-painted sketch book I printed onto A4 sheets of paper, really to enable to reduce/enlarge and print just using black and white. Prefer the paisley shapes, definately "wings" in the making but hadn't noticed until I started printing although Wendy had. Looking forward to further development of these.

Exercise 1: Find blank sheets of white paper(as suggested in the book) far too scary so painted pages first.
Used a circle and then a paisley shape. Really enjoyed doing the exercise, it confirmed what I already knew... I much prefer curved lines rather that straight, finding the shapes that were dissected with curved lines far more pleasing than the straight.
Have cut stamps, not thirty I hasten to add, using the shapes i liked most so aim to print a little with them today.

At first I thought, "drat, I'm getting an imprint of the edge of lid."









And then I thought, "wow, I'm getting an imprint of the edge of the lid!"

I used a Staz-on green stamp pad at first and then without cleaning it, added watered down Golden acrylics spread out on a nonstick craft sheet.

These are stamps made by cutting out phun foam and glueing it on plastic lids. I think the almost clear lids will make it easy to place the stamps - except of course, on black fabric.
It was just a repeat of the circle exercise - I cut out a circle and then dissected and reassembled them almost duplicating the paper circles.

Squares

I'm not in a mood to move on yet. Still working on Exercise #1 with a different shape.

Heart shape exercise 1

I used a heart shape. Cut out a bunch and played around. The hardest thing was trying to keep the cut pieces within a heart outline. All the samples here were cut from a heart the same size.













I photocopied one image (middle page, bottom image) and played around with it. It didn't take long to achieve two border designs and a handful of repeat patterns.




I transfered the image onto an eraser using a solvent transfer medium and cut it out. To get the mirror image I inked up the stamp and stamped onto another eraser.

Circles

These are my circles cut and reassembled. I chose one of the designs to expand on the idea. I don't know why I picked a circle, I should be working in a grid if I want to have any translation to my weaving.

Finding your own visual language

A blog for those of us who have a copy of the book and would like to work alongside to help and support. If you have a copy and would like to join us, please leave a comment.