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Thursday, June 04, 2009

Workshop Fun






...and transfer dyeing is great fun, especially when there's a group. This was last week's workshop in full swing, working with transfer dyes and lutradur. A good deal of hilarity masked the fact that everyone was actually working pretty hard. We discovered lots about transfer dyes, and about lutradur, too, which, considering I was squashing elements of two different one day workshops into one two hour session, was possibly not surprising. As you can see, the dog was the only one who was completely disinterested in the whole affair; Lucky is a sweetie, but she doesn't do art....she does, however, enjoy the biscuits at coffee time.

It's interesting to run workshops in a gallery space; when you are looking for examples of good design, or a particular approach to work, there is always something to refer to on the walls. Or you can use them as inspiration, as you can see from one of the images here, which is a drawing of one of my totem dolls on a piece of lutradur. I thought, myself, it looked like Tina Turner in full flow... And if you want to refresh your memory about transfer dyeing, there's a post about it here

We're focussing on words this month... last night, we worked with found text, next week, we're making little translucent paper bowls with individual words trapped within them. It'll be interesting to see how that turns out!

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Collage...


was always something I avoided. Recently, though, I've been making quite a few... and this is the most recent, made as a sample for my class on Wednesday at The Gallery, Dereham. It's amazing how much can be done with such a limited palette, and really not many materials. We'll all be making something using those principles tomorrow night.

When I do teach workshops, I rarely ever provide a 'pattern' or a specific set of instructions. Instead, I make suggestions, show what is possible, or at least, what I think is possible at this point; you might find there's yet more you can do with what I'm showing you. And that's the joy of teaching workshops in this way; if you provide six people with the same materials and the same instruction, they can produce six completely different pieces of art. Of course, if you want to copy what I've made, you can...but I'm pretty sure that yours will turn out with a different 'feel' to mine. Why not try it?