The second week of term was a continuation of last week, although instead of using ink and rollers we used graphite and wax crayons to take rubbings of textures. I enjoyed this a lot more; I thought the graphite especially picked up finer details of the textures and further textures could be achieved by moving the paper around to overlap the rubbings. Also by doing this you could create a dark to light shaded affect along the piece of paper.
Using the wax crayons and drawing ink or water colour paints we did some wax resist samples. Using the white crayon was very effective because you couldn’t see your marks on the paper until the application of the ink or paint revealed the image. These samples felt really dynamic and lively, and it was refreshing to introduce some colour after working in grey tones.
After lunch some other people in the class brought in some leaves that they’d foraged in the college garden, and kindly shared with everyone. The leaves I thought were especially pleasing because there were so many fine textures on there that you don’t even realise. It was a more delicate process to pick out these details and the edge of the leaf than it had been to create the larger sheets of textures earlier in the day.
The last technique we did was using a cut edge of cardboard loaded with graphite to make these really soft motifs by gently pushing the graphite off the edge of the cardboard with a piece of cotton. You could really play with the shading on this and control where the marks went, creating quite a three-dimensional effect.
Our homework was to use the textures we had made during the class to create little books. I felt like a lot of my textures reminded me of the different kinds of ripples you get on a body of water, so I tried to reflect that my compositions, particularly in the ‘zine’ style book.
The concertina book I kept simpler, just including one sample per page. I started to add more pieces to it, but felt that it detracted from the idea, especially as I think of water as quite calming. Sometimes simple is best!
