Wednesday 26 January 2011

Happy Australia Day

To all my fellow Aussies, Happy Australia Day, and to my best Friend Joanne, happy Birthday, a special one indead.

Arlene

Tuesday 11 January 2011

My Line Course

G'day all,

Over the last couple of months I've been working on my line course, and have finally finished.  first of all we had to do some research on a line designer, and a brief outline on the relevance of line in design. then we did our drawing.  My design idea came originally from a gum leaf, I choose it because of it's slim line and texture.
This first photo (above shows this in a sepia colour)
Here is my single line drawing of my leaf.
From here we were then to add more depth to our line drawing.
So using different pencils ranging from HB to 6B, I drew them.

The next exercise asked us to use the 'L' frame method, and wingle it around our drawing to single out a section to enhance with more lines and doodling. First photo is using the 'L' frame.
 Second photo is adding more detail to my leaves.
 And the third part of the second exercise was to add doodling to the line drawings.

Colour was next.... this photo shows the colouring using brown charcoal and acrylic paint. i also used crayons and felt pens.

Exercise 4 involved drawing texture, this was done on 5 piece's of paper, one using a fine tip pen, i also used chalk, acrylic paint, crayons and charcoal. this photo shows the fine tip pen, which I used for exercise 6.
Exercise 5 was to go back to our exercise 2 drawings and add more texture using some of the pen strokes used in the grid above.

This turned out quiet good I thought.
Now the next two exercises were a bit more challenging. Exercise 6 we took our exercise 1 line drawing and laid it over the top of our exercise 5 texture grid and drew a few shapes, as you can see in the photo below.

We were then directed to cut them out and cut into smaller pieces and place them around and make some different designs. This is one of the first ones I came up with, does it look like a boot to you. Well it did for me and so ......... 
So thinking this was what I had to make my final design on, I stitched it, but not so...... That was suppose to come from exercise 7, anyway I have a nice piece now......
Exercise 7  we were direct to using another design from exercise 2, we were directed to enlarge our picture and cut into 1 inch strips. Number the strips as we cut them and lay on a piece of paper and slide the strips up and down to get an entirely different design.

 You can just see the lines of the strips
 Add more lines and then add colour. Using whatever was on hand.
I used satin ribbon, silk, feathers, wool, paper and felt tip pens.
Now the next was to do our embroidery samples, there were 5 to do, linear stitches, textured stitches, patterned stitches, isolated stitches and the final piece. Here is my sampler for the stitch groups.
 And my final design from Exercise 7, stitched.
I learnt a lot from doing this course and hope to do more, just got to convince hubby it's worth the money......
TTFN
Arlene

Monday 3 January 2011

My new toy

My darling hubby, who is getting to be quiet the handyman, has made me a box frame light box. Total cost $35.  I had the perspex and so he made my box to suit the size as this would be the lid. The wood and the light was all we bought.
TTFN
Arlene