PE Task 2 - Sampling unit

I mainly gather inspiration from Friday drawing sessions and, in this unit, I had a chosen image – Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques. With this image, I am reflecting the colour mood on to my samples and using it as a starting point.  I also gain inspiration from my surroundings, for example found objects and natural objects in everyday life.

Looking at a blank sheet of paper or fabric, sometimes I found it difficult to start, but then I looked at Mark Hearld’s works, how he uses storytelling as his templates, and I started to think about the connections between my motif designs and creating my own narratives. 

My hand painted designs - Overlapping.

My hand painted designs - Overlapping.

Mark Hearld – Garden Birds.

I enjoy working with found objects, mark making and accidental stains that are made during the process of drawing and making, and looking back at my hand painted designs, they are more abstract compositions compared to Mark Hearld’s print designs.

With my hand painted designs I am more interested in working with movement and mark making, because when I look at the colour mood of the image, Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, I am also looking at the brush strokes, and that inspires me to overlap colours using paint. 

One of my Photoshop digital print design.

My digital print designs include more linear elements. They also contain more objective drawings, less mark making and no accidental stains. The designs made in Photoshop are cleaner.

With Photoshop designs, I am able to work in a more controlled way and adopt the layouts in Mark Hearld’s works, to achieve clean cut designs. I am able to remove any unplanned accident and make each design more individual. 

Fat drawing by Daksha Patel

My hand painted design – Collage.

I have signed up for Daksha Patel’s drawing workshop on 27/1/14.

The idea of this workshop was to use imagination to make connections between objects, in a way that is unlike museum displays that create exhibits and group objects together in categories.

After speaking to her about my project and struggling to relate it to Data, she inspired me to think of ways of composing and representing my collections.

As a starting point, I adopted the scientific way of drawing by using golden rules.  I experimented with drawing pigeons and tigers, and then I developed to include organs and skeletons within my designs using my imagination to make connections between them.

Mark Hearld’s work in printed fabric for furniture. 

Even though my hand painted designs are not figurative like Mark Hearld’s, the similarity of the elements within the composition makes me think about the marketing area and companies that I could be involved with, such as St Jude’s. St Jude’s is a company that adopts and transfers print artists' designs into textiles productions. I imagine my hand-painted designs being transferred into a repeated pattern or a one off mural print as wallpaper, greeting cards and printed fabric.

Furthermore, the relationship of my colour mood, designs and process could be displayed as a series of works in an art gallery as I related my project with data and adopted Daksha Patel’s way of thinking by making connections between my objective drawings.

My designs are flexible in relation to different types of audience, but I would focus on illustration, as objective drawing and observational are my strong point.

I would place myself as an exhibition artist, specialising in textiles, print and embroidery. I also see myself as an illustrator for both hand-made and digital for St Jude’s.

This unit forced me not only to experiment but also to put more time into the making and designing.

However, I realised that I have not done enough new research using my own interests, and this is something I need to improve.