An online course

 One of the tasks I set myself whilst we were in Scotland was to participate in an online course. I am never sure how much art I will get to make; how hard or how easy it will be to do so, so as an insurance policy I set the time aside to do a course with Sally Tyrie through Fibre Arts Take Two called Visual Narratives - Print, Paint, Stitch.

I will be doing this course for much longer than our time here, but it has been so good. I really struggled at first as I couldn't get into the groove, I saw a lot of people on the course diving in and doing amazing things and was feeling somewhat out of my depth, and I realised I was in a remote locality with little or no access to all the materials required and only a dinky little travel printer! But I gradually sorted my head out and worked out how to make it work.

Working within constraints.

The calligraphic layering I played with here was part of the course.

I really enjoy working with the idea of place and chose as my starting point the fishing net drying poles and the fishing sheds in the village.  I have photographed those poles so many times, in so many moods and thought they would offer me somewhere to begin.

One of the main ideas in the course is to not make a direct translation of a place, but rather to try and abstract it, and move away from the obvious, creating a sense of place, hinting at the essence of it, without being able to say - oh look, that's an Armadale fishing net drying pole kind of thing.  

And so I began. I have taken and used sooooooo many photos! And learned a lot of techniques of modifying and editing.

And printing in black and white on fine tissuey papers was a thing. And the printer was not fond of the light paper! Altho as ever, the mistake became interesting, with the judder of the paper the image broke up  a bit.

 

Getting into  the detail.

All in all I have printed and created a lot of papers for use in collages.

Starting small in my journal.

I wanted to try some 'real' work on a small scale - everything I work with here is small - and chose some luggage tags as a starting point. 

I am not great at this collage thing. My brain keeps interfering with itself and I find it hard to let go and just respond to materials. I also find it hard to rip things up or cut them and so I have had to work at that.

I have made two luggage tags - yay me.

One in blues and one in browns.

 

But every time I walked by that brown one that white rectangle was all I could see. So I darkened the spiral knot with a black pen and took up the whole white piece with the concentric circles. Which helped a bit.

But it still stuck out and drew the eye way too much.

And so I covered it with some transparency which had a print on it of sorts, which knocked it back and made it a bit more interesting and less obvious.

It is a truly wonderful course and from my interaction with it thus far, I would highly recommend it (and I expect any of the courses offered by FATT). I have a long way to go, and many many new techniques to try and I expect I could be here for quite some time. Being able to go at your own pace is good, and I have recovered from my fear of not keeping up or being good enough and am pottering and pushing myself which is a good combo.