exploring the orange cont.

starting to play around with a rather orange moodboard.....

gathering things onto sheets exploring the earthy orange tones...

BAM! powdery orange! this was actually bits of pastel shredded up to roll my paper-bead experiments in, to add texture to the finished surface of the beads (I'll add pictures of the progress of these soon). However- I love the effect of the colour on the shiny silver foil I had to hand as a surface to crumble it on- there's potential explore these colour combos with the contrasting silver sheen, further, I think!

my powdery splats onto foil remind me of these kind of splashes of colour that were dotted around the earthy ground of Tanzania:

now- drawing from my floor silhouette images. just outlining the silhouette shapes on tracing paper with pastel lines, playing around with the dark shadow and bright outlines on tracing paper (the fact that you can see the newspaper I was working onto underneath is not intentional, ha!)

pastel exploration of organic flow of orangey ground, contrasting with the purple/plum/pinky shadows... there is so much to explore from my research! and this has just been with a focus on 'orangey' areas so far!

exploring the orange

Immediately from my research, I am drawn to: the ORANGE.
...powdery orange dirt, red-orange brick, earthy orange tones mixed with vibrant splats of plum - never before have I been so excited about orange!

So I started painting and pasteling up some paper from my imagery, trying to mix the oranges.
and thinking back to how in Tanzania, I was fascinated by all the paper beads made and sold by the local people; I chopped up some of my painted paper into strips to make my own 'beads', as a way of exploring the range of orange colour...

Here's my box of research photos I took in Tanzania- lots of orange to explore here!

here's some of the paper bead necklaces I brought while in Tanzania. The local people make them using strips of magazines/newspapers/leaflets, cut into strips, carefully rolled, then varnished with PVA...I think this coating makes the colours so rich and beautiful (note to self- maybe explore varnishing/adding shine to surfaces as a development to this initial exploration sometime soon...!)

an example strip. I found that cutting the paper at different angles results in different shaped beads, altering the proportions of colour within the strip that are visible in the final bead- could be something to play around further with...

 on a roll here making my beads- literally

 some close ups of one type of my painted paper sheets. Here I am exploring the mottled, dusty, powdery texture of the orange earth. I began with a base of orange oil, then mixed up various shades of gouache to brush over the top, creating a resist against the original vibrant oil. These photos were taken when the paint was still wet, so it has a shine. It could be interesting to take other colours and see how they work against this orange now...