extracting colour

After the colour workshop, I've been going through my research photos and pulling out the colours to make some more palette arrangements linking to my project.

Seeing as the Tanzanian landscape had quite a busy feel, with many different materials and surfaces being recycled and reclaimed, and being reused in a multitude of ways, I like the idea of using found objects in my colour work...it's like the 'fabric' of the environment there was very responsive, in flux, and cultivated collectively by all the people living there...so I want my work to have a similar feel...a bit of a jumble...collections and arrangements of colour that evoke the lively, quirkiness of the place....a sense of rawness and imperfect human touch....a realness and an immediacy....

Weave under-way!

It's weave-time! First I tried plain weave, the most basic style of weaving. I think it could be quite effective to have strips of plain weave in bright blocks of colour between sections of more structured/manipulated bits of weaving. 

Looking at my artwork and windings, I decided to start playing around with a few different colours and qualities of yarns in the weft. I especially want to focus on getting the plastic-y shine of my research objects, so I've been making up bobbins with iridescent thread wound into them and have brought some jelly-like plastic cord. 

mixed blue and iridescent bobbin

 Lisa introduced us to lifting plans, where you can move the heddles in different formations to start creating different patterns in your fabric. Here I was playing around with a 1/3 twill- I like how you get a different effect on the front and the back. It will be interesting to fully examine this when my samples so far are cut off the loom!

I feel like I only just got going- now I have so many ideas I want to try out! Next week, I want to try and experiment a bit with the surface of my weave, and see how I can add in some more texture, rather than having all completely flat pieces. I hope I'll have enough workshop time to play around a bit more, as well as making some final samples for the block. 

playing with colour/pattern/texture

Part of drawing and analysing my objects has been to look at the colours, textures and patterns, which I'll be able to derive inspiration for my work in the technical blocks from. 

Creating windings with yarn and material scraps helped me start to think about colour combinations. Lots of my objects have a plasticy shine to them, which prompted me to look for some shiny threads, and to incorporate rubber bands, wire, shredded carrier bags and other alternative materials into my initial test pieces. 

I now have a swatch book full of lots of mark-making inspiration too. It was interesting to look at little details and textures on my objects, then record them experimenting with scale, repetition, rotation and then colour. The only restriction was the dimension of the squares I could do my mark-making on! Once I got going, I really enjoyed this- it'll be a great starting point for print designs.