Memoirs of a Sewer

Posted by Agnes Iley , Sunday, December 26, 2010 9:33 AM

How many ways to draw a neglected 88?

For the next exercise I choose this picture of a neglected 88 butterfly.

I never heard of it before but I was struck by the tribal look of this little creature.

 

For exercises 1 to 3 I drew it in pencil, oil pastels, soft pastels, watercolour pencils and torn paper collage.

Then the real fun started the exercise told us to develop design ideas from the drawings.

I started with the collaged wing. I photographed it. And used the kaleidoscope function on my graphics software until I created a nice design.

I liked the design, but it did feel like the curtains that my grandma had in the seventies.

So I decided to make some changes to the colour. I upped the yellow and green hues and ended up with a very light and bright picture.

But more definition was needed, so I copied everything with the colour black from the second picture and pasted it on my lime green background.

Now this was much better, but one more detail was needed.

Next I copied everything with the colour orange and pasted that on my lime and black design.

From boring and quite dull, I feel I have gone to a vibrant and exciting design.

 

Next up was the oil pastel wing.

I also used the kaleidoscope function on this. But this time I cut a little square out of the pattern that emerged and pasted a lot of these squares together.

This resulted in this design (the marked out square shows the size and pattern that I started out with).

I really like this design, I can see this in a combination of patchwork, embroidery and raised couched threads.

 

For the final design I used the soft pastel wing.

 

I started out again with the kaleidoscope function, which gave the picture a feel of chunky woodblocks.

I wanted something a little more delicate so I decided to add some waves.

This gave me the idea of 3 dimensional or raised work.

I pictured a green (gradient) background with an overlay of rows of waves.

The longer I looked at this the more I thought about the waves being layers of needle lace.

 

I wondered if I could make this visual in a picture?

I can see this either as a wall-hanging with a raised surface or maybe even a green tubular vase with an overlay of lacy waves.

I found it pretty amazing how different all these designs turned out, after all the all they all came from the same picture!