Showing posts with label Gail Harker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gail Harker. Show all posts

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Book of The Rising Sun




These photos show some of what I did today in day two of Gail Harker's Sketchbook workshop. I've tried to get the proportions of the different colours from my sunrise photo represented in a collage of papers. In the next photo, I've positioned a ginko leaf on papers I painted and the bottom photo is my clean up rag, which reminds me of flowers, and I can imagine adding stitch to it. While I have many journals with text and others with drawings and photos as well, I haven't yet included stitch and paint and that feels like the direction I'd like to head for my 'personal library'.

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Eye Candy for Halloween











Today I've been learning new 'tricks' from Gail Harker in her Sketchbook/Visual Journal workshop. That's Gail in the third photo holding one of her 30 delectable sketchbooks open. They are truly yummy, with stitch, pencil crayon, paper collage, paint, text and pens - a visual feast. I've learned alot today and tomorrow I'll be back for more. I can see why others I know love Gail's classes!




Thursday, August 13, 2009

Meaning is the Key











I am feeling really pleased with how my cloth is turning out. I began today by writing text onto the quilt with fabric pen and then added lighter value pencil crayon to make the letters more legible. Then I added pattern to the moth wings with copper paint and sequin waste. Next I added cheesecloth to my brayer and rolled it through copper and black paint and onto the background of the cloth around the labyrinth - you can see this effect in the photo directly above(I was thinking of string theory and the universe). I made a stamp with a key by taping it to a wooden block and then stamped it in gold paint into the center of the labyrinth (photo above the one of the cheesecloth design). I then added feelers to the moths with felt pen (nocturnal creatures who navigate by feel, as I liken how we intuit and create meaning) and then cut a star out of craft foam to use to rub shiva paint stix over. The light stars drew my eye more then the central key, so I thought about how I might alter that - maybe make a trail of gold glitter leading to the key, through the labyrinth? But I was loathe to make it too gilt - I was aiming for some subtlety and a sense of the ephemeral. I ended up putting gold glitter on the stamp of the key to heighten its contrast and I think that works pretty well. You can compare the difference of the key before the glitter and after in the second photo from the top. Each time I made an addition to the cloth, I felt the risk of possibly ruining what I'd done so far - yet I also felt the pull to keep making it more interesting and infusing it further with what I was trying to express. On a different note, yesterday I signed up for Gail Harker's 'A Journey of Visual Discovery: Journals and Sketchbooks. Gail usually teaches at her Creative Studies Center in Washington, but she is here in Victoria in a few months to teach this course and its an opportunity to see whether I might sometime want to take more of her stitch-related courses. I have always kept journals and in recent years I include visual information, but I want to develop my sketchbook abilities further because I still tend to largely use text in mine.