Text(iles) - Olwyn's Gourd

Olwyn and I played around a bit with her gourd-design since its a theme in her embroidery. In the second one, the O is a gourd and the U suggests a vessel. I've added a photo of a very old gourd I have which was repaired while it was being made. It has since cracked but it is about 50 years old. Olwyn, I would love to see your work on this theme when it is complete!

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3X5 cut letters

A 20 minute warm-up doing cut 3X5 letters. All the letters except M, W and I are 3X5 and they "work" because the straight sides sorts the spacing.

Jackie, Marian, Janet, Hilary and "Gourds" by Olwyn

This is such a useful alphabet for group work. with kids, teachers, calligraphers, embroiderers! It's chunky so can be cut out.  Its an alphabet I learnt in 1982 in banner making, long before my involvement with calligraphy. The idea is to cut the letter sizes by eye, and then cut out the negative spaces, using paper or fabric. This casualness creates a dynamic variation of letters. 

I give these away because they are really useful and promotes the making of letters. They can give a great deal of pleasure to kids and novices! Cut them out in patterned fabrics, glue them on and you have fun banners!

Tomorrow we'll see the beginnings of Olwyn's gourd design.

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Text(iles) - The Exploded Letter

It's amazing how letters get really exciting when you start playing with two colours and shifting them around.

Now cut them out of fabric, add stitching, embroidery and embellishments and WOW!

Ivy: Phillipa Jackson (here you can see the process); Borders: Dodie; India: Jo Faulkes; Cat: Janet Humber; Liz - Liz Frampton; Daisy: Tina Sharpe. Will the people whose names I missed please let me know who they are so that I can acknowledge you - Letters, Ken, JKW 

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Text(iles) in Fareham

I was invited to give a one day workshop to embroiderers on adding text to fabric.
As I'm a bit of a fabric junkie, I was enthusiastic, although a little apprehensive about how the embroiderers would receive me. Usually people just use a font these days and feel fine about that. How to show another way of letter making?
We were using cut paper as a medium for designing letters to be translated into fabric and stitchery. Here are two of the methods we explored.

"The Exploded Letter"

and PAX which is made up of cut strips, then traced and re-cut from paper.

There are also many other ways of designing lettering or text for fabric, but these two are really good for chunky letters that can be cut out.

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Oxford Summer School - The show ain't over

...till the Fat Lady Sings.

Cathy, Debra, Yvonne, Cathy, Louise, and Susanna painted the fat lady in various poses.
I gave them no time to think, told them a little story, named poses, posed her as much a possible and it was just go,go go for a spontaneous painterly expression.They had to improvise a little as well. The Fat Lady is an old friend of mine from Cape Town and she usually stands in my sitting room. A quick shortcut to stylisation is to begin with a sculpture and paint it in such a way that you have made the artistic outcome your own. It also teaches you about the process of stylisation - exaggeration, adding pattern, avante garde colours etc.

And here is the outcome after dividing the A2 sheet and concertina-folding it.
This was a fun project and each person made up their own script to go with their books.

Debra Kaatz gave her fat lady rainbow wings.

Susanna Evans was really dreading having to paint so quickly and under such pressure but she certainly created a charming little book!

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Oxford Summer School - Blind contour drawing

I love drawing the hand with the students. Hands are kind-of the ultimate in drawing. If you can draw your hand without it looking like a bunch of bananas, you can draw anything. We jump into the deep end with doing a blind countour drawing of the hand. This means that the artist doesn't look at his paper at all, but slowly draws all the contours and edges without lifting his pencil. The results are usually a very strong graphic image. 
Elizabeth Crowley explored her hand drawings by creating a concertina book.
She combined the drawings of various hand poses by willing models, with layering and collage using incidental text. This is an art form she has worked with, but her blind contour drawings were something new.
She'll complete the book at home.

Combining Text and Image:
Oliver Leech had begun a poem written by his son about a wren. His first rough which he brought with him was in Italic but he wasn't very happy with it. Monoline and pointed nibs are new to him and so is pen and ink drawing. He tightened up the bird / text image and ended up with some totally different ideas to work on. He will probably re-do the piece leaving a small even margin of white around the wren.

I think the wren project really explains my vision of combining text and image very well with related textural patterns or strong stylised shapes.

Barbara Williams was justifiably pleased with this drawing of her hand which she did straight after doing a blind contour drawing.
(Apologies for the quality of some of the photos - I didn't realise that the light was cast by tinted windows until after summer school, so couldn't re-take the pics.)

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Oxford Summer school - funky birds & a warthog

Drawing words and writing pictures

Just how can we combine text and illustration to create an integrated design? This workshop is for calligraphers and would-be lettering artists to learn drawing skills combined with modern handwritten letters. Learning how to look, and enabling the right side of the brain can awaken drawing skills. We will create some exciting pieces of stylised work combining monoline lettering and drawing using various tools and techniques.

The less experience you have with drawing, the more you will enjoy this workshop! It can be scary stepping out into the unknown, but letting go of preconceptions about your ability can free your hidden ability. At the end of this workshop, most people are amazed at what they are able to produce.

I am really tired now after five intensive days of teaching.
This has been a lovely course to run as my students were enthusiastic and stuck to the rules and produced lovely work!
The rules were:

• The process (in your head) is more important than the product.
• No disclaimers about your work.
• Only give out positive energy and smile at your work.
• Trust the process.

The results were fantastic especially as many claimed to be non-artists and even non-calligraphers.

One of my passions is working with image and text. I believe that since text is essentially two-dimensional and pattern-like, the image works really well when it is a strong black and white stylised image. Printing techniques such as lino cuts or wood cuts work well, but there are many other routes to stylisation. Some of the processes used in learning how to draw, such as blind contour, semi blind contour or drawing directly with an unusual instrument (such as a kebab stick) can work really well.

Top to Bottom: Louise Brown, Mary White, Yvonne Leach, Cathy Park, Wendy Lord.

PS: See Friday's blog: Art in Action Best of the Best: The ceramics came third and the glass wave fourth. A marbled piece of silk about 6 meters in length was first and second place was a lovely wooden sounding bowl. 

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Oxford Summer School - The crane flies

Top to bottom: Beryl Knotts, Oliver Leech, Viv Hanreck

Drawing Origami Cranes is a very good way of learning to draw flat planes in space using the pencil held up horizontally or vertically to help check the angles of the wings against an imagined vertical or horizontal. 

Participants block one eye to create monocular vision to 'flatten' the object and draw foreshortening correctly. This exercise is completed by using monoline lettering to write a piece of text that integrates and harmonises with the composition. I was delighted with the results!

One of my ongoing themes is the problem of how text and image can be combined to create an integrated artistic statement rather than a poem with a picture attached.

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Oxford Summer school - 1000 cranes

I began my teaching course at Oxford summer school and we started by making origami cranes and hanging them in the class to draw tomorrow. This course is called Drawing words and writing pictures and drawing cranes offers the chance for great text and also the drawing of angles and spatial planes.

Sadako and The 1000 Cranes

Sadako Sasaki was twelve when she was diagnosed with leukemia as a result of the bombing of Hiroshima when she was two. A little friend told her that according to traditional folklore, if she could fold 1000 cranes – a Senbazuru - a wish would come true. She folded cranes using every bit of paper available and soon her ward was filled with origami cranes. She had folded more than 500 cranes when she died and her classmates completed the 1000 cranes which were buried with her.

In Hiroshima's Peace Park, there is a statue of Sadako holding a golden origami crane as a symbol of peace. Thousands of paper cranes from all around the world, are at the base of the statue and she is remembered on Peace Day on the 6th August every year.

I first heard Sadako's story when I saw it enacted as a string puppet show in Cape Town. The theatrical effect of hundreds of paper cranes was amazing.

While it may not seem relevant to start a drawing class with origami, I really believe that we need to inspire people on a visual and a spiritual level.

Postscript:  My Japanese students laughed at the elementary origami cranes we make - these are definitely primary school cranes and they make quite exotic complicated ones. Having taught origami today to people new to this art, I think its just as well that they are easy to make!

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The Art of Herman Killian

South Hampshire Calligraphers Workshop
Killian's work is epitomized by classical simplicity with an underlying tension within every letter. Beginning with classical forms then moving on to modernising these using ligatures, reversals and other capital forms we will create a piece of work in graphite

LK, Iola, LK, LK, Anon, Olena, Sue, Lesley, Kim, Sharon, Val L, Anon, Angela, Marion, Jan, Val Y., Anon, Joy, Angela, Anon. (I didn't notice I'd scanned Angela's in twice, then did another three to make up the square! Duh!)

After anaylsing Killian's work everybody traced the letters and measured them, comparing them with Trajan Capitals. Guess what? They were just about identical in width.
Keeping this in mind, participants explored their own letterforms drawing from alphabets they were familar with. They composed ligatures, referring to Killian's, mine and tried some of their own variations.

Jan Sambell

 The "project of the day" was a little daunting in that a letter design was to be put into a circular format. Its always good to challenge people and was certainly worthwhile.
Pencil work is beautiful and very yummy, but really does not photograph well. Also, the artifical lighting complicates things, so I had very few photos I could use)

Marion McKenzie

Sharon Robinson

Sharon Robinson - detail

I felt that everyone had the beginnings of a successful piece to take home to continue working on and what is more important, a new understanding of letterforms and their inter-relationships. Thanks for the hard work everyone.

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Adolf Bernd with Oxford Scribes

Just back from Singapore - and have just begun posting the Singapore diary, so this one may fudge the chronology - anyhow...I have just had an enjoyable afternoon with Oxford Scribes and one of my favourite Maestros - Adolf Bernd.

Participants - please forgive me, but I should have put your names next to your beautiful little capital letters as I photographed them and I didn't have my act together. However, I think you'll agree that this is a lovely montage of your work. (I also hope you are all represented)

We began with analysing Adolf Bernd's work and colour mixing - and everyone produced the most exquisite colour combinations. Bernd uses a lot of degraded colours and often works with complementaries and sometimes it was a challenge to mix a specific colour. Of course, in a one day workshop it's not possible to attempt a complex capital letter, so we concentrated on small artworks. The first project was to do monoline letters using Art Deco lettering as inspiration.



Cynthia Harper's swatches and H design

As you can see from the montage many people began using the brief as a springboard for their own original concepts - and that is exactly what this workshop is about - starting by looking at a master's work, extracting the essence, experimenting and then using the experiments as inspiration for their own ideas.

I was delighted with the outcome!

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Memories - photo transfer

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Jen's mother - various experiments with different techniques

 The photograph transferring went very well indeed, although we found that the originals needed to have a high contrast of light and darks for a good result using "Quick off" - a type of thinners, and acrylic matt medium. The pictures below on a silk-cotton mix were Quick-off transfers from good quality "toner" photocopies. There is a softness and ethereal quality that is diffiuclt to simulate in Photoshop.

Work by Geraldine and Gail

The piece below was printed on ink-jet treated fabric and there is an exact replication of detail. This is often what is required although it may be difficult to incorporate it into a complex fabric artwork, because the precise detail would contrast very strongly with any additional details. As ink-jet fabric is obtainable in different types of fabric such as the organza one, if you wanted a "misty" result on silk or organza, it could be done using quick-off onto cotton, then scanned and printed onto ink-jet treated organza.

Jean's boys when they were scouts

Geraldine's transfer on organza, photographed  against the backdrop of garden

Acyrlic Matt medium transfers from ink jet copies on acetate often left a coloured ink print (even though the original would have been black and white) because ink jet black ink is a mixture of coloured inks.

Sue's trees did not transfer very clearly at all, but left a rather lovely bark-like background for machine embroidery.

Gail, Lin & Sue's transfers

The next step was to work with printing styles and we began doing this with rubber stamp letters and stamped tiny letters to be embroidered. And then we ran out of time...

I would love to see what the embroiderer's make of their photos, how they add words and perhaps stitchery onto the fabric photos to integrate them into artworks.

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Skating on Thin Ice

I was delighted with the work that everyone produced at the workshop. I know that when everyone walked in to do a watercolour workshop exploring translucency and they saw the Gothic exemplars on the desk, their hearts must have dropped. But of course, take away the strong contrasts, keep the rhythms and abstract textura effect and it's a wonderful alphabet to work with.

Mary, Alison and Bill

We began with abstracts. To have a large stretched sheet of paper, yummy paints and to be given "permission to play" is quite liberating. The next step was to produce simpler washes of colour and to use Gothic written with balsa wood as a pattern. Here are the results: 


Alison, Debbie, Pam and Roz

 

Sue, Val &...?
Who is the artist - please let me know?

 Well done everyone!

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Skating on Thin Ice - Open Books

Another lemon by Su.
I feel she has really caught the essence of the lemon - simple transluscent strokes and exciting colours.

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Skating on Thin Ice - Open Books

Our aim in this artist's group was to explore watercolour techniques using a limited palette of transparent washes, and shape and form of a piece fo fruit - in this case a lemon.
(This workshop has a different format for calligraphers)

Lois - detail of abstract free-painting

Carole - detail of abstract of  free -painting

Sue - detail of abstract fo free painting

Maggie - detail of abstract of free painting

And here are the lemons!

Maggie, Su, Carole and Lois

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