Jeremy Shirley - Bus Shelter Project

Here is an artist whose work makes a difference. He paints murals on bus shelters and buildings to make people smile. This happiness deters those with the urge to tag blank walls.

Jeremy currently lives in Hamilton, New Zealand and has left his mark all over the country.

Here is a link to an article explaining why he puts his art in the street  Jeremy Shirley's art

Pattern Design Course Progress

One of the morning exercises was to analyse different patterns and to find examples of different types of patterns to put in our Pattern Dictionaries.

Elisha is working out how this pattern was made.

Elisha working with a new stamp she carved.

See below the resulting pattern.

Charlotte's new carved stamp produces a number of appealing repeating patterns.

Another pattern Charlotte produced with her new stamp.

Connie made several stamps using hot glue. They make a distinctive mark.

Pattern Design For Artists

The students have spent the past couple of weeks learning how to make repeating patterns, developing their own designs then using them to create different patterns.

Connie cuts a quick, inexpensive corrugated cardboard stamp to trial a design.

Elisha created a design based on a building then translated it into foam stamps, one the mirror of the other so she could make a greater variety of patterns.

She chose one of 17 different patterns she could make with this stamp to print on a heavier weight cotton.

Charlotte is developing designs based on the pineapple.

Sarah is exploring pattern making with a design based on lines found on rocks.

She made quick foam stamps of the design in the positive and negative and the mirrors of both. These 4 stamps allow her to create a vast number of different patterns.  

Connie's humming bird wing design is proving to be most successful.

She has produced many pleasing and promising patterns with it.

Pattern Design: Linear Patterns

In the 2nd lesson of 'Pattern Design for Artists' we begin exploring linear repeating patterns.

After making a quick stamp to trial a design we used it to make 1 dimensional patterns.

The above image shows the set up for printing as I was taught by Eleanor Hannan  www.eleanorhannan.com. It is such an efficient way to stamp, paint-wise and time-wise. Thank you Eleanor for so generously sharing your knowledge. 

Elisha is developing designs based on the geometric shapes of buildings.

Sarah is working with natural patterns on rocks.

Connie is developing hummingbird based designs.

The assignment was to produce 20 different repeating patterns with their 1st design.

Teaching at Victoria College of Art

I spent 2 days getting the Victoria College of Art's Lower Studio ready for teaching in this spring term.

This is the before shot.

Day 2 my well-trained assistant set up the print tables.

All ready for "Pattern Design for Artists"

I enjoy teaching this course because there are always great discoveries to be made.

Maria Shell - SDA Conference Exhibition, San Antonio

Another stunning exhibition at the SDA conference was a collection of Maria Shell's quilts, at Gallery Nord.

"Color Grids"

Every quilt was made using the same quilt block.

But Maria played with 'line, shape, print, and color' to produce a collection of technically exquisite and very different quilts.

The quilts were installed in a 3-sided booth, which made viewers move in a complex dance back and forward between the walls as they looked, compared, and looked again as discoveries were made.

Denise Jones BA(Hons) Embroidered Textiles

My poor quality photography does not show the exquisite embroidery Denise worked on each of the cloths.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Victoria College of Art Student Work

This is Esther Paterson's display of work she did in the Pattern Design for Artists course.
Esther chose to work with an eye motif and produced many patterns she will use in her work.

Sonia Park was a student in the Mark Making With Thread course. She had to return to her home country, Korea, before the Christmas show so she has sent us images of her completed work.

Sonia's needleweaving sample on her stamped ground

Sonia's 3D project using needlweaving techniques

Handwashing Day

Hand washing some of my thrift store finds and successful bids at auction houses.
2 fine wool shawls, one with beautiful, woven, floral border

Wool blanket - well used but laundered carefully over its life time so no sign of fulling.

Piece of old silk velvet in blue and gold - a little fragile but washed up well.

A friend found this treasure for me at a garage sale - a heavily metal embroidered, Indian made evening purse.

It was rejuvenated after a light vacuum and spot clean.
It is now in my closet because I'm going to enjoy using if for awhile.

Pattern Design Stations in the Studio

To teach the Pattern Design course I set up stations around the studio.

This is where I demoed how to make different stamps.

This was a cutting station, though the students had space to set up their individual cutting stations too.

This is a print station. I learnt this set-up from Eleanor Hannan when I was in her Compositional Cloth course at MISSA this past summer (it is officially fall now). I found having the large foam print pad made printing so much faster than inking with a breyer or roller.

This was the Supplies station. Different people donated materials to the class so the students had a lot to choose from when they were planning their stamps.