1.4 Shapes

When looking at my images of the coast and seaside towns the initial shape which caught my eye was domes.  Whilst this may seem strange, I think this comes both from the era when seaside began growing in the late Victorian period, when all things exotic were popular, and from the area I visited which is close to Brighton and the India-inspired Royal Pavilion.  Domes seemed to be everywhere, on roof-tops, as lamp-posts, on the pier, etc.  

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I pull together some drawings of domes to look at the various shapes.

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I also had some pictures of the Easter Cathedral in Russia and used one of these domes and associated shapes to produce a lino cut and tried printing some images onto paper.

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However, this shape did not seem to meet the brief of having enough inverted areas to develop the image.  I therefore looked back through my pictures and began to draw from a photograph the breaking wave shape.  I simplified the shapes to make a line drawing so that I could concentrate only on the shape of the wave.

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I made a tracing of the drawing and a smaller card template of the shape.  I then started some of the exercises to look at the effects on A5 paper and this is a college of some of the images.    

#1.4.5

I then produced a lino cut printing block of the image and began printing on both white and coloured A4 paper backgrounds.  I also cut up some of the images and re-arranged then to produce a new pattern.  the pencil drawings are my original images for the shape.   

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I particularly liked the effect of the gradually fading waves as the block is used without re-inking. I then used the curved wave shape and produced some shapes in tissue paper and glue them to cellophane, overlapping them to get different tones, as in my rock pool images earlier.  

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This over-lapping of transparent layers is something which quite interests me so could become part of my final project.

I need to think through how it will work when my overall design for my final project is better formed in my mind.  I have an idea of background layers of different images and shapes, with some form of ethereal images, based on my personal experience as a child at the coast.  I am also thinking at this stage of a narrative in my final image (as it is a wall panel), being alone as a child, how as we get old we become alone and, following a visit to Hastings where I saw many young people sitting alone, interfacing with their technology (iphones, ipads, etc.), rather than enjoying the beach and being part of the community.  All this is at a very early stage as I work through the research project. 

I produce another layered image using more geometric shapes, just because I enjoy the effect it produces - different tones which produce new shapes within shapes.   

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