I thought it would be useful to see how the sculpture will look in the painting, giving me an idea of how a drawing would look in real life.
The right hand angle looks way better, the angle on the right makes the shape look flat and not dimensional. I discovered this in my sketchbook and this is proved again here.
This went terribly!!!
I did no practice, I just started on the paper – turns out that was not a good idea!
I first mapped out only the lines, following the pattern I made when drawing the sculpture straight on. But the shape didn’t make any sense. So i blocked in the white to see how that would look.
That looked slightly better, but still very terrible.
The I thought well it’s not working so I’ll just add grey shading and see what that does.
I used a white posca pen to do the white, because it is smoother and faster than acrylic paint, for these experiments.
Laying the structure on top and underneath the paint layers. Although this was hard to do because the painting was so dense with brushstrokes and I hadn’t planned it.
White colour. Contrasts well against everything else.
Blocking in areas in white of the shape. Actually works surprisingly well. It makes the shape make more sense as a design. If the sculpture had less blocked areas, filling in with white would be less obtrusive.
Grey shading. Helps to create dimension, but if the drawing and sculpture is good enough, it shouldn’t need it!
Wobbly legs. Just use a ruler! The more exact the better. For some reason all the things I learnt, such as exactness and measuring from last term went out of the window.
The whole thing! The sculpture is not drawn accurately enough to make sense and so it fails.
The angle of the sculpture and where it is placed. Needs to be planned and considered. Having a less confused painting underneath would help with this.
Scale. The bigger the more all encompassing and vast. But I knew this, and I will be going bigger v soon.
Plan my next attempt! Use digital editing to do so.
Practice drawing the sculpture at these angles in my sketchbook.
I painted outside just now to prepare the page for the sculpture test drawing I’m going to put on top. This was the first painting in this style I have done in what seems like a while! This is not really true, but compared to last term I have been doing less painting outside.
The woods that I painted in I am really familiar with. I have visited other woods, but I keep returning to this one. One reason for this is convenience – it’s right outside my studio and so I don’t have to haul all my painting equipment a long way. But also, I was listening to a podcast yesterday, this one:
And they were talking about returning to the same objects or places again and again. It made me consider how I have returned to this same woodland for over a year now, and how that impacts how I paint and what I experience. I haven’t got any answers as of yet, but it’s an interesting thing to consider. Is my painting affected (for good or bad?) because I return to the same woods? Am I training myself to notice new things whilst painting in the same environment?
One thing I did notice about these woods from where I was painting was the depth of layers of trees and foliage. This photo contains the view that had this depth, you can see trees in the distance that are lighter, washier shades of green than the foreground. It was a lovely place thing to try and paint on part of the paper.
I painted this view as well as a clearing to the left of it, where I imagined the sculpture I had made to sit.
Acrylic on paper. For speed and ease.
^ This is a screenshot of a zoomed in image of a painting I did last term (oil on paper). Looking back on it it strikes me how effective the paint application is – there is so much depth. I think there are two reasons for this:
– Thickness of paint: I remember using a lot of Liquin with the paint to bulk it up and make it very slidable on the canvas. The thickness means the paint layers hardly mix with one another, instead they look like they are floating near each other with space in between them.
– High contrast in tone: The dark background behind light blue behind varying tones of colour marks. Contrast creates greater separation between marks, making them seem more separated.
I have only considered the second reason now, after already painting this most recent experiment. I would like to test these two ideas in a series of future paintings. I wondered whether having not many marks on the canvas also added depth, but looking back at Howard Hodgkins work that doesn’t seem to be true…
Although I didn’t follow through with the idea of high contrast tones, I did make sure the paint was applied very thickly.
Thick pain: It does add depth, and it prevents the colours from mixing together.
C shapes marks are lovely! I realised I was reducing boughs of trees into these c shape marks. Describing blocks of leaves and branches with blocks of colour.
I applied paint too thickly too fast, without considering my marks and colours enough. I ended up battling with the thick paint.
My palette was too small. When applying thick paint, I needed to mix a lot of paint in a variety of colours, so I needed lots of palette space to do so! Because I had a small palette, colours were easily getting mixed up, and I could never get the right shade, because it was mixing with other colours and going muddy. As a result the colours are dull and low contrast.
Lots of small marks added at the end. Disjointed, no sense of direction, so feeling of woods whatsoever. This is due to me battling with the thick paint as mentioned above, and adding lots of unnecessary marks on top to try in vain to get the colour and layering of colours that I could have put down earlier in the painting process.
Page too small. I am used to working with big canvases now! Which means lots of room to fit in all the layers and detail I wanted. I was trying to cram too much onto a tiny piece of paper.
Bigger palette
More contrast in tone.
Do underpainting of a block (dark?) colour – like I’ve been doing before! I don’t know why that went out of the window.
Keep the thickness of paint, just don’t start adding so eagerly and early. When working with really thick paint, colour mixing and placing of marks need to be carefully considered!
This has to be one of the worst paintings I’ve done in a while. OHWELL. I need to do some more, since I have learnt so much from doing this one.
Now to add the drawing on top.
Klint, H.af et al., 2005. 3 X abstraction : new methods of drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin, New Haven, Conn. ; London: Yale University Press.
I wanted to read more about Kunz’s work since I realised how similar her drawings are to some cathedral architecture. Surprisingly the only book I could find on her in the library was this one, but it is actually very relevant to my work.
preceding the abstraction there is something from which the form has been drawn. While this something may be a concrete object in the phenomenological world, it could just as well be understood as the formation of an idea apart from any perceivable object in the phenomenological world.
P.23
^ This is what the structures I make in drawing and sculpture are.
Abstract art can be envisaged as an oscillation between the imagined and the concrete… with both to draw from and to draw form
P.23
Zegher goes on to say that the three artists in this book don’t approach abstraction ‘as a kind of formalism’, but as a way to structure ideas of philosophy, spiritual and scientific ideas. Kunz for example draws to connect ‘a cosmology of invisible forces’ – I love this idea!
These woman’s projects were aimed at summoning an ideality understood not only as a rational model of perfection but also as an emotional model of relinquishment… and response
P.24
Using drawing as a tool to elevate the mind. P.25
Their work was is inspired by an interest in nature and therefore human life.
A connection between the ‘physical phenomena and the spiritual universe’.
Using art as a bridge between the spiritual and the experimental makes sense to me. Abstracting things on a canvas that cannot be seen in the rest of life seems a way of capturing things that cannot be said with words. Things to consider in my work for sure. This is the kind of writing that I will read and only realise the total implications of it far from now! I wish I had more time in this project to read the book carefully, without a deadline fast approaching.
Detailed drawing. Transferring dimensions back onto paper.
I then traced this drawing with clean newspaper paper, and cut around it so I had a template for the next drawing.
I reduced the detailed painting down to lines.
It’s interesting how this drawing is so different from the original design for the sculpture below. The new drawing is far more organic than the design.
The problem with drawing this sculpture looking straight ‘up’ at it, and not including any shading, is that the shape loses all of its dimensional qualities that are so crucial to these structures. I thought drawing things looking straight up would help me work out the design of the structures better, but it now appears that just drawing the sculptures looking straight up misses half the point, since these sculptures are meant to be drawn from angles and have real dimension I shouldn’t just be drawing the sculptures like this.
I had one more go drawing the sculpture looking straight up. This time I wanted to block in areas that the sculpture would cover of the sky / canopy above. (The painting underneath is also of looking straight up at the sky / canopy) This shows how much of the sky the sculpture covers! In my next design for my next sculpture I need to make sure there is less planes that block out the sculpture.
Also, adding lines as if the legs branched out was useful in imagining the sculpture standing up high. I definitely need to add legs to my next sculpture.
Draw the sculptures from different angles of standing underneath, not just looking directly up – this is why I’m making these sculptures!! – to paint from angles and create dimension in my paintings, so PRACTISE THAT!
Less coverage of the sky and trees above the sculpture with finer coverage and more just lines.
Add legs! – This will mean I can draw the sculptures from angles more easily. And also photograph the sculpture in the woods!
I want to experiment with blocking in white areas in drawings when drawing the structure from different angles. Would it add or subtract from the finished painting? I haven’t done that before so would have to see.
After a tutorial about my work I wanted to try out paper mache. It sounded like it had the potential to be a lot finer and more delicate than clay, and also much stronger than clay and not subject to cracking.
I designed the shape being far more precise than I have made designs in the past. This shape was inspired by Emma Kunz’s drawings, and also by the Cathedral architecture imagery from the books I had been looking through.
Using a very accurate design with shading to demonstrate depth, and knowing how I wanted the finished product to be, was a much clearer way of working than I have worked in the past, for example with the clay sculpture where I did very rough sketches and then finished the sculpture off as I went. Having a detailed plan meant I didn’t waste time, and I added the full wire armature before I started adding paper mache.
I started with this octagon shape, using wire criss crossing the centre to keep the shape in position. It’s been a bank holiday this week so I couldn’t go out and buy thicker wire! So I made do with the bendy wire, wanting to get started with this process instead of delaying it.
I knew that the paper mache would dry very firm, so I thought if I start laying down paper mache early, it would act as a support even though the wire was thin and bendy. But, the problem I didn’t anticipate was the drying time of paper mache – it’s sloww. So I would have had to have waited hours for this initial frame to dry before I added the next layer – too slow. It seems there’s no getting round having wire that’s too thin!
Half flour half water. Mixed to a smooth thin glue-like consistency. Not too thick or it’s too gloopy, dries even slower and is sloppy to work with. Not too thin or it doesn’t have enough sticking power.
I used newspaper thin paper, which I luckily already hah yey. This worked really well – it was thin enough that it applied really thin layers, but not too thin that it disintegrated when trying to work with it.
I would rip strips of paper and then soak it in the paper mache on both sides before removing it, scraping off the excess glue with my fingers, waiting a couple of seconds and then applying it.
At first I really struggled wrapping the paper strips around the wire – it’s harder than it looks! But eventually I got to know the right angle that you wrap the paper around the wire.
I should have taken more progress photos along the way!
To get to this ^ point, I made the outer hexagon and the inner hexagon shape and then attached them together with wire connecting corners to corners and sides to sides. Then I added the curved shapes.
Then I covered it all in paper mache. I was surprised at how easily the paper mache held its shape when I applied sheets of it to the curved shape. I then waited for the shape to dry.
The sculpture dried a nice light colour but once it’s finished I intend to paint it white so it matches the colour I would be painting it.
I went in with a second layer of paper mache on the underside of the sculpture. Unlike my previous clay sculpture, I wanted both sides of the sculpture to be finished. I used a small brush here to get into all the small areas, and lay down more paper and glue to smooth over any gaps.
I now realise I didn’t do the bottom part of the sculpture! This bit:
I just didn’t notice that I hadn’t added this part of the sculpture in. It would have been hard to differentiate between the part I left out and the bigger plane because I am not using black lines to separate sections. So I could have left the bottom part of the sculpture empty that might have been good.
Leaving this out has proven that the more detailed the structure the better.
The finished sculpture after two coats of white acrylic paint! I decided not to add legs to the sculpture because I would have had to have added them before using any paper mache, plus I don’t think this sculpture, as my first try has been successful enough to bother putting legs on.
The sculpture translated well from drawing to finished piece. Using a very geometric and accurate design was very helpful. It was really cool seeing the sculpture transform from a drawing to a 3D object. I had to change the design slightly when I was making it, my intentions on paper weren’t realistic for manipulating wire in real life, but that way of thinking will come with more practice.
Paper mache is better than clay. For these delicate structures paper mache has such potential! I really enjoyed working with clay, and how you can add textural detail and streamline every form. But working with paper mache allows for such fine shapes, it is the perfect in between of the delicacy of wire and the form of clay. And with more practice I can make the paper mache smoother and more clay like in its streamlined-ness.
Painting the sculpture white. I need to bring some salt into the studio for my next piece so the glue doesn’t go all browny/green! But I would have painted it anyway. Painting it white highlights the form of the shape, and removes and distracting texture and colour.
I can see this sculpture translating well into drawing, but we will see!
Measuring things with a ruler as I’m working
The thin wire is once again an issue – it is too bendy! Any angular, straight precision is lost because the wire was way too bendy to control. I’m not using this again. The sculpture looks too loose.
Design is lacking legs duh. Next sculpture I’ll add some.
Too simple a shape I think.
How effective the shape is will be revealed once I have made some drawings of the sculpture. That’s what I’m doing next! I’m excited to do more.
I was doing the sketches for my paper mache sculpture and was using the book The Cathedrals of England by Clifton-Taylor as well as images of Emma Kunz’s drawings for reference. As I was looking through images I found two that were SO similar!
The left image on my laptop is of a drawing by Emma Kunz and the right image is in the book, of the ‘Central tower vault’ in Lincoln Cathedral.
Similarities:
– Both have square shapes with the centre exactly in the middle, multiple square shapes in different sizes surrounding this middle point
– Both have lines all converging at the centre
– Both have four arrow shapes that converge at the four corners of the outermost square.
– Both have an ‘x’ shape that is the backbone of the rest of the shapes.
When I saw Kunz’s drawings in person and imagined them being transformed into 3D ceilings, I didn’t expect that to be found so exactly! I would love to go and visit some of these cathedrals to see how these shapes play out in real life..
I wonder if it is a coincidence that Kunz’s drawings are so similar to Cathedral architecture! I know her work was about the universe and spirituality? But I don’t know too much more than that. I think I need to do some research on her work.
