Summer Workshop With Diane St-Georges
Hello All. I hope you are having a great August! I wanted to tell you about a very valuable
learning experience at a recent 3 day workshop with a wonderful local acrylic collage artist.The main focus was on learning about different kinds of good composition and how to identify and strengthen them. We worked to make coloured tissue papers and also some textured ones in both black and white, so that many layers of value could be added to create combinations of image and written text which she then critiqued for compositional strengths.
On returning home it helped me to finish some 5x7 submissions for the upcoming Wildcard Auction. This is a charity auction to benefit the bird rehabititation center in my neighbourhood.
The third day was by far the most difficult and intense. The exercise was to make a composition using 15 dynamic shapes none of which could be the same or touch eachother. This made repetition an impossible technique to fall back on but she did encourage us to use small medium and large shapes in odd numbers. My final composition was a bust but when cropped shows how the power of large shapes in opposition can be a strong force in any composition.
To get fine lines,we used a dripping technique with black house paint slowly hovering over white tissue paper. (Dry flat on plastic surface and peel off when dry).
To get text or photos onto tissue paper for collage we used acetone rubbed quickly to the back of the tissue layered with a photocopy print side up. This allows you to use your own pictures in a transparent fashion over colour or to overlap images.
This work could have easily been done on cotton if left pinned to dry as the medium used to fuse the layers does tend to shrink.So much fun to do!! Look forward to seeing all the challenges for fragments soon !
This sounds like a really good workshop - fun to do but something you can carry into your textile work.
ReplyDeleteYou've done a good job of describing the various exercises Michele. I have a bit more work to do on my stuff and then I may be able to post too. Pam is going to be super-busy for the next few days but I hope she has a chance to post some of her images. Diane is a wonderful person, so positive. I love the way she always brings us back to the principles of good composition.
ReplyDeleteIt must have been a very exciting 3 days. I like what you've produced! Thanks for posting.
ReplyDeleteSounds like you had a very interesting and useful three days. Looking forward to seeing the results close-up.
ReplyDeleteThese are stunning creations! Your descriptions are wonderful...do you think this technique would translate to fabric easily?
ReplyDeleteThere is no reason not to use these techniques on cotton for art quilts ,they call it paper cloth. The idea would be not to get too many layers if you have alot of stitching in mind. One could substitute hand dyed sheers or scribble text on chiffon to use in layers with the photoimage paper cloth. Heather has some experience with the Tuscany pieces that she last posted using phototransfer and fusing it to cotton then layering paint on top. There are endless possibilities it seems!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the excellent descriptions of the techniques Michele. They seem to be perfectly suited to your work. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteWhy do I have to live so far away?!!!! The one thing I think most quilters (artists?) find the most difficult is composition.
ReplyDeleteI love all your pieces from the simplest to the more complex. What a fantastic opportunity. Lucky girls!
Hilary