Crumpeling Clay

 I wanted to use a different medium to portray my crumpled leaf veins pieces through. I wanted to experiment a bit with trying to get the right textures and effects so I started with the bag of clay that had been resting itself on my desk for the past few weeks. I put the techniques that I had learned from Elaine's 3D workshop to use and got started!

In the 3D workshop that I took with Elaine a few weeks ago we used a heavy duty grease proof paper to get a certain texture in the clay like this:

This was the kind of texture I was looking to achieve again, so starting off I rolled out my slabs of clay and began to texture but I noticed after using the one piece of grease proof paper the texture would not repeat again the paper became useless. To overcome this I did my crumpeling technique with some sheets of paper as I do to create my pieces like this:

And I discovered this was very effective in creating my desired pattern, and this is how it turned out:

Being happy with this I kept texturing slabs, being more and more daring making the slabs bigger each time! By the end I had about 5 slabs, so I picked up my courage and started doing the tricky bit... which was to make the slabs resemble crumpled up paper. After awhile (and a few ripped and pieced back together) slabs later this is what I had:

 

I'm quite happy with how the pieces turned out and hope I have time to get them fired before the Xmas Holliers!

 

Leaf Piece (Cabbagey)

 

I made this wall piece using the space behind my desk, I hope to turn it into a mini instillation experiment before going home for Christmas! I had been trying out different methods and colours and stuff with my crumpled paper for awhile and I wanted to turn it into something... bigger! (Macro even). I had all these loo roll holders hanging around (I sort of collect them, it drives everyone crazy 'coz I tend to give out if I find them in the bin :P hehe), lets face it when you're an art student you absolutely never know when things like this could come in handy! I used these loo roll holders as my main veins in my piece (if you look closely at the back of a leaf you'll notice how the bigger veins stick out but the littler ones you can only see) and I used my crumpled paper for the inbetween veins and made it BIG, its the size of the wall: (which ok, isn't so big but it's big enough)

I began by painting like 6 or 8 A1 sheets different greens and different speckles and stuff.. (really trying to get in touch with my inner 'nature').
















Then I used my hot glue gun to merge all the loo roll holders together and stuck them to the wall and all the paper pieces were brought into the equation.

It was difficult trying to get the paper to stay on the wall so unfortunately there was some hot glue involved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm happy with how my little piece turned out... However.. It does rather resemble a leaf of cabbage for some reason :/ but I still like it :)

Photograms

I went to a photograms seminar the other day, really interesting stuff! Given that I am hoping to perhaps study Photography I decided it was probably best I learned what a photogram was let alone how to do one.Of course we had to bring along something we could experiment with and so I brought along possibly the most difficult to work with this I could have.. Acetate.. acetate with a glue gun drawing on it.

Needless to say this was my first attempt at photogramming..

And this was my second..

And so accepting defeat I chose a different item to work with, a crumpled loo roll holder and a leafy piece of plastic I'd made! So here was the first result of that:

damh straight!

 

So once again picking up my courage I decieded to cut some photo paper into 4 mini sheets and have a final stab at the acetate that I refuse to let get the better of me!

So here were my results the first I did is the first to the left and the last one to the bottom right:

Inverse Images

I had a tutorial with Elaine the other day and she took me and my work down to the photocopier, now let me tell you I cant work technology for my life it honestly scares me because I know if anyones gonna break it its gonna be me. :/ But anyway she was doing some pretty cool enlarging and inverting of my images and I just really like how they turned out, They gave me new ideas of things to go check out and take some pictures of. Heres one images that was preodced by just scanning my paper in:

I like how some parts baecame out of focus and others appeared so sharp.

 

Here is the same image again but inverted this time! I have done these pieces on black sugarpaper using white pastel but I'm intrigued by how different it looks just by scanning it in and inverting the white image!

This little bit of experimenting has given me new ideas to go take some photographs of sheets of crumpled metal, rocks that are charred and jagged etc. The inverted image kind of reminds me of marble stone.

 

 

Fungi Stuff

I was lucky to get the use of a college camera this weekend past and what happens? It rains cloud pee all weekend, just my luck! But I decided to not let that stop me so the second I saw a break I ventured out to the park of the people... or more commenly just, Peoples Park. I know I've kind of got my project in flow now and I'm working on the particular leaf veins thing but I still love taking pictures and who knows when they'll give me inspiration or whatever so here are just a few I took that worked out pretty ok :

 

They are mostly of fungi I found. Theres the most amazing tree in Peoples Park and its absolutely covered in fungi... It's got no leaves or branches so its kind of just a really big stump but hey, its got fungi!

 

 

Veins in Colour

I wanted to try to bring more colour into my work and In order to do this I'd to experimant colouring the A1 sheet with different mediums bewfore doing my whole crumpeling thing so the first one I kinda did by accident but I thought it turned out pretty cool.

 

I was working with chalk pastels and I crumpled up the page, then decided to colour it so I had to straighten it out again and going over it with the pastels then highlighted the folds made by the initial crumpeling, then I crumpled it again and used dark brown pastel to do the last bit! So below are two images of how that turned out:

 

 

Then I tried just pastelling (if thats even a word) the page before the crumpeling (two images below) and I didnt like that as much so I kinda gave up on the pastels then, trying paint today!

 

 

Macro Ceramics

I posted up yesterday about my 3D workshop with Elaine and most of the stuff we covered and I also said I had some interesting Macro shots of the clay textures I was working on, They are for the most part in black and white (considering the clay was gray) but I also felt this gave them more of an impact, so here we go:

 

 

 

looks to me like one of those textured walls on a house up very close!

I wanted to document the process of these textures and only while I was photographing did I notice how the textures looked when photographed

 

 

Loved this one as i thought it was very simular to the paper pieces I am working on at the moment with the crumpled kind of texture!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is more or less the same image as above but only now the layer of paper that sat atop the clay has been removed leaving behind the texture alone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Really loved this as a Macro shot! Elaine showed us how holding a lighter to this kind of grease proof paper made it pop and bubble, which I thought was really cool!

 

And here are just some more Macro shots of different clay textures that I found interesting:

 

More Textures!

This texture produced by wrapping wire around a styrofoam ball, I prefer this texture when stretched out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cardboard strung together rolled over the clay gave this effect to the left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some insulation pipe ripped in half was one of my favourite ones, I also took some Macro shots of these textured pieces because I thought they might look quite interesting so those are to follow

 

During the 3D workshop Elaine also thought us some pretty cool techniques and things that would be revelant to us. These were things I'd never have really thought of trying myself and I'm glad now I know them.

 

 

One of the things was using hot wax to do various things, this was a good thing for me to learn as it could help me hold my paper pieces in place once their crumpled, so to try it out I crumpled some newsprint and dipped it in the wax, let it drip then left it to dry! I really liked the result.

 

 

3D Workshop

Took my first 3D workshop yesterday which was helpful beyond belief! It was great getting to explore different textures I could make in clay that relates to my project, you'd be surprised what you can use, just about anything really! Here are a few images of my textures :)

 



This texture was produced using a ball of twine, see how the top piece has stretched out? It can change and distort the initial texture which is useful to know, see the more upclose image below!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love the positive and negative spaces the twine leaves behind

some heavy duty grease proof paper scrunched by wrapping it over a rolling pin and forcing it down on the ground

The same grease proof paper crumpled up gave a nice textured effect on the clay!

 

 

Developing Ideas

To get a bit further away from my initial images, ideas and drawings and to venture out further into the unknown is kinda scary.. but I just have to stop being scare of messing up and just go for it! I was given an idea that I should try working with paper and paper folding and so I started wondering how I could relate this to my work and looking at my photos I thought well.. you cant really fold anything that could relate to nature because a straight fold is like a line and nothing in nature is perfectly straight, thats the beauty of it right? so.. I got my page and screwed it up in a ball and got this lovely assortment of random folds and lines and I decided to go over it lightly with compressed charcoal and got something like this:

 

Then I decided to try it bigger out of my sketchpad and got this:

 

Which I really like as the black is so strong against the white and its like a play on positive and negative spaces. I love how the crumpeling of the paper has suddenly brought a 3D aspect to my sketchpad idea!

 

 

Then I tried it on black sugarpaper:

 

 
 It looks really interesting to see in person! It almost looks like a sheet of metal that has been crumpled and dinted (I am hoping to photograph sheets of crumpled metal this weekend).

 

Doing this has given me a whole new range of ideas! In this shot up a bit closer it appears almost like the texture of a rock.

 

And up even closer again it still holds interest in the colour and texture of the piece. Im very excited to advance a little more on this idea.