I Did It!

            After a few solid days of hard slog, I have finally gotten somewhere. Although I complained about Richard in my last post (the tutor who told me to push things further) it turns out he was right all along. I have spent this last week really trying to experiment with ideas and shapes and colours and techniques and I now have what looks like a quite exciting sketchbook of things that could develop into something quite good (if I do say so myself).

            So what am I actually doing? It turns out I have a bit of a fascination with birds. Over my last few projects at uni, I have incorporated birds and bird shapes and feathers and things into most of my work. You may have seen the pattern work I showed in my last exhibition which involved flowers shaped like birds. At the moment, I am playing with the shapes of birds to make repeated patterns to cover walls and things. The bird shapes are becoming kind of abstracted over time and as the patterns repeat the shapes interlock and the birds might not look like birds at all.

            What I find particularly interesting about birds is two things: the shape, and the colours. Birds are such beautiful, graceful creatures; their shape is what allows them to fly. They have really interesting heads, which is kind of a weird thing to say, but they do. Look at swans for example; the shape of a swan is almost iconic. And then the colours; if you look at exotic birds in particular, their feathers are such vivid colours, and the birds are made up of so many colours.

            I have used the shape of the birds to make the shapes for my pattern, and now I need to study the colours so that my simple shapes can come alive. Watch this space…

Also, just to give you a small taste of things to come (although the outcome I am hoping for is not much like this) here is something I have been experimenting with;