Chapter 2 : C --Star Shapes from Coloured Papers

At long last, after a long hiatus due to family upheavals and a broken computer, I am back, and hopeful that I shall be able to stay on track this time!
For this exercise I stuck to my chosen colour scheme and cut out a variety of star shapes from the yellow/orange paper and stuck them on to the blue/violet paper. I used a scissors, a craft knife, a cutting wheel, a wavy scissors and a pinking scissors, along with some very careful ripping to cut the various motifs out with. Some of the shapes are layered one on top of the other.

Working Sheets

I have transferred my working sheets to a gorgeous Pink Pig sketchbook which just asked for furtehr development of my chosen colour scheme of blue/violet and yellow/orange.


The little sketch below was done with a wash of watercolour pencils followed by crosses using watercolour markers.

The top sketch is cross hatching using colouring pencils in complementary colour scheme. The sketch at bottom of page was made with oil crayons followed with a wash of Brusho inks.

More oil crayons and Brusho ink wash but this time colouring with wider and larger strokes of crayons.

Chapter 2 : B Printing onto Coloured Papers

More fun this afternoon making a very simple printing stamp from a new rubber. The colours are based on my complementary colour scheme -- blue/violet and yellow/orange. It was fun to turn up the music (Cold Play) and stamp away!!

Chapter 2: A - Making Coloured Papers

I had great fun this afternoon preparing sheets of coloured paper for chapter 2 work. I managed to find perfect matches for my 2 main colours -- Jacquard Procion MX colour #199, ice blue, and Brusho colour in orange. Then I played with these for a while.....

Crayon Rubbings

The above are crayon rubbings of a kitchen tile, a bathroom tile and the side of a woven basket.

Chapter 1 - Line Drawings

Colour Wheel

This colour wheel is the final result after a number of unsucessful attempts. The first obstacle was actually learning how to use a compass crrectly so that the starting and the ending points met!! The next problem was how to divide a circle into 12 equal segents. Thank goodness for mathematically literate children!!!
The paints recommended in the module turned out to be quite costly so in the end I prchased a small box of Daler Rowney acrylics and used these along with a couple of other colours from my daughters paint box. (She is studyig art in secondary school.)
The second picture is the accompanying Working Sheet for the colour wheel.

Old Embroidery Patterns

Accoding to Sian, these are lace patterns that look as if they are a structure called Reticella lace which is a 16th century Italian lace or actually a stitched lace and therefore embroidery and not a lace. A form of this lace was revived by John Ruskin when he lived in Cumbria. He enthused the local ladies groups to work a similar method on a thicker, linen and it was called Ruskin work. It’s still popular today.

More images

Sian's comments on my research images:
You have researched the shapes thoroughly, finding several organic shapes as well as purely decorative features in manmade items. You’ve found mainly symmetrical examples so far. Can you find any that are asymmetrical? Any set of lines that cross over each other such as the shapes between the tiles or the linear structure of scaffolding, gates, roads at traffic lights could be called a cross or star shape.

Module 1; Chapter 1 -- Research imagery: Stars

The following sets of images are a collection of star shapes in various guises, both natural ad pieces of artifice, collected from a range of natural history, textile and gardening magazines.