Saturday 26 September 2015

Colour Curation

I had the opportunity to show my colour blind friend, who sparked my self-initiated project, all of the samples I had made and it was fascinating to hear what colours he could see. There were a few colours (particularly the pale pink and the bright turquoise) that he saw to be a different colour pretty much every time he came across it. It helped me see in my own work how the surrounding colours have an effect on one stand-alone colour. Also it was encouraging to hear that although he said it wasn’t very obvious to him, he was starting to understand the concept of the colour purple which he was previously completely blind to. Although I am not sure of the final context for my work, it is really satisfying to have produced work that has so positively impacted on someone’s life and quite literally their vision. This has impacted on some of the research I have done for my dissertation and encourages me to keep my eye out for arts/health and wellbeing opportunities in the future. 

I have also been offered the opportunity to exhibit my work in collaboration with some Art History/Curation students which I am very excited about. The exhibit is called “Curation of Colour” which is obviously a fitting theme for my work. Having sent the curators images of my work they have offered me a window space so that the light can really enhance my work. I am excited about collaborating especially because they have not asked for a specific piece to be made they just want to curate samples I have already made, so it will be really interesting to see how they curate my work. 

Monday 21 September 2015

Experimenting

This week I experimented with lots of different techniques creating a range of samples. I really like the effect created by contrasting a bold machine satin stitch with the more irregular hand stitch. I feel this reflects well where I have used different media in my drawings.



In an attempt to create some speedy samples I tried to lay down threads and stitch over them. Although I like the colour mixing in these samples I feel like some of the linear and grid qualities of my drawing have been lost.

To take a different approach I experimented with some beading in between machine stitches which although I quite liked the contrast in weights of fine fabric and heavy beads however not all of the beads were opaque and some of the colour intensity was lost. Also I feel that the uniformity of the beads means the hand drawn qualities of my drawings have also bean lost.



I also found this with some samples I created using water soluble. I found that a lot of the linear grid qualities were lost and that having a white background would better reflect my drawings.


I have also created some only hand stitched samples, the first of which was needle weaving. I really like this sample because I have used the three primary colours and woven variegated threads through, which really recreates a pixel effect. I also like this sample because it creates a little series and sits well in the white space around it.




This week I would like to try and keep my backgrounds white to better reflect my drawings and experiment with found materials such as ribbons to help make some of the processes a bit quicker but still maintain a strong grid structure. 

I really enjoy creating these small scale samples, I think in terms of context I would like to produce a collection of final samples that might be bought by others as inspiration. It would be interesting to try and produce a sample book similar to the work available from James Hare Or some kind of colour trend book similar to ones found at: http://www.james-hare.com/607-embroidered.html


Monday 14 September 2015

Colour Research

Having spent the summer doing drawings extracting colour from places I’d visited over the holidays, I was swapping visual research with a fellow art and design student who is colour blind. He told me he couldn’t see the colour purple. I was really taken aback by the idea of someone not being able to see an entire colour. So I started thinking about ways in which we as humans create colour and mix colours. He is blue/pink and green/red colour blind so it would make sense that he would struggle to see purple. After considering ways in which colour is made up on screens in pixels I decided I would see if there was a way to translate this effect into fabric. After exploring and looking deeply into woven fabric that use different colours for warps and wefts and how that can drastically change how a colour looks I decided to create some drawings:




I have thought about using lots of different materials for my drawings including inks, crayons and coloured papers for collage, however I feel these crayon and ink combination drawings are particularly successful. 
I think I’d like to experiment using the embellisher and couched down threads as well as experimenting with different hand stitch techniques such as needle weaving and kantha stitches.
I think it will be really interesting to see if I can recreate this different marks made by the different media I have used and whether I will be able to maintain the same level of optical illusion as I have managed to achieve in my drawings.
I really like the “grid” quality of my drawings and how this reflects woven cloth in my drawings and I think this is something I want to try and recreate in my embroidery.