Challenges again

Remember back when we did two challenges in rapid succession? We wanted to shake things up a bit and try some new things. Not everyone took it as far as finished pieces of work, but we all played with different ideas.

Here's the bag Helen made from the letter challenge. It has a Japanese feel to it and we think it's just lovely!

Cindy made this design from the designs she made in the drawing challenge. It may find its way into a work one day - for now, it was fun just to play around with shapes and colours.















Maz also created a design from the drawing challenge.

It's interesting to see how she got to this point, from the earlier designs!

Nola had also created some line  drawings from the drawing challenge but they weren't photographed on the day She says they'll probably turn up as postcards shortly!

The challenges were fun to do, because they gave us a chance to play, with no real investment in the outcome. Often we're so busy doing the next thing, learning, making something for a specific purpose, we don't stop and try different things and just play around with them, with no special expectations. Hopefully ,we'll make some time to do this kind of thing again.

Challenge No 3: Drawing inspiration

After our break in September, we're back refreshed and raring to go! It was Maz's turn to supply us with a challenge, a drawing exercise. Like most people who work in textiles without a fine art background, we're not proud of our drawing skills! But this wasn't about producing beautiful works of art or even recognisable images; the aim was to create a set of lines from which we could create work.

Maz set up an amazing conglomeration of unrelated objects for us to draw. We each had an A3 sheet of cartridge paper, which we divided into 16 rectangles. And we were off! We were instructed to draw a section of something into any rectangle on our page, as quickly as possible. Then another... and another. By the end of the allotted time, we had pages filled with squiggles like this:


Nola's drawings

 

Maz's drawings


Amazing, huh? Nothing any of us were terribly proud of! Then we started to play with the drawings.




One strategy was to use  a pair of small mirrors to generate reflections. These are from Nola's master drawing.

 

We also traced interesting sections of the master drawing or isolated small parts and enlarged them.

Carol's drawings

Carol traced main lines on her master drawing with black felt tip pen and connected them.

 

When we found sections we thought were promising, we worked on them some more, sometimes even adding colour.




Helen's drawings

Cindy's drawing


















Nola's drawing

Nola's drawing

Nola's drawing



Nola's drawing (she says it looks like a fat ballerina!)

Our challenge is to make at least a postcard from our drawings, for our second meeting in November.