Process Into Image Paint Brief.
Week 2: PROCESS LED INQUIRY: Drawing from Printed Fabric.
Drawing Processes:
* Select a third image(s) or item to draw.
* Analyse the image’s visual properties (figural and abstract).
* Generate multiple drawings.
* Process this image by reducing, confusing, or altering using a range of methods (i.e. charcoal, graphite, provisional paint studies, gouache, or watercolour sketches, alterations using the photocopier, overhead projector, photoshop and other digital imaging software).
3. PRINTED FABRIC – Haute Couture Fashion Dress / Dance Costume by Designer Iris van Herpen in collaboration with the Dutch National Ballet Company. VIDEO LINK: Dutch National Ballet X Iris van Herpen present fashion- and dancefilm BIOMIMICRY.
The fabric of this fashion outfit and dance costume is extraordinary. I love how it falls, drapes and moves with the dancer. This was an easy selection, yet quite difficult to draw quickly, because I really enjoyed adding and blending colour. I love the pattern textures, shapes, lines and colours of all the costume fabric in the film, but I chose this fabric because of the paua shell rainbow effect of the gold, blue, pink and purple palette.
I enjoy mixing and merging colours, and creating smooth and rough textural surfaces with paint and pastel. Pastel is an easy material to manipulate, so I began with this medium, then selected some colours from the fabric (e.g., cerise, cream, golden yellow, blue and purple). I focused on both colour and line simultaneously, with a desire to produce the folds and creases of a fabric portion. I also tried to evoke in my still life drawing the movement quality of the dancing costume fabric.
My favourite drawing happen very fast, (below), and began as one of two drawings on a left-hand side of the A3 size paper (below left). Yet, suddenly I flowed across to the other side, and my second drawing (below right) became part of the first, even though I made some different marks.
Across, over and under, appear many soft and delicate marks, set and arranged quickly around the space. I like the colours and lines that have been inspired by the fabric such as the blue, golden yellow, cerise and purple. I worked really hard, not thinking, just doing… with loose gestures, and a gravitational pull.
I realised I was making a mess with many flakes breaking from the pastel sticks, therefore I gathered, and let go for gravity and chance to take over. I loved how they dropped, cascaded like a waterfall into the shape of a coned mountain.
From one drop, I used my fingers and the verbs to pull, smudge, smear, drag, lift, flow, curl and undulate. It was lovely to make thin, snake-like and delicate threads (below) from the hard pastel pigment crumbs and slithers (above).
On a thin length of brown paper, I again dropped remnants of my pastel work. Mostly blue and white smears created another design (left: Figure 26). Then, I digitally altered this blue/white work through repetition to make a grey, green and red work.
