The River Project

River Project

This is the beginning of the river project which I started during the holidays. I wanted a natural look about it so I made an old music book look battered and worn like it was found by a river. I also added certain implements to make it look detailed and attractive to the eye. These included plain string, a feather found by a river and a tag with illustrated words on to make it look inciting. 

At college, it came as a surprise to me that we were going back to basics. Using pieces of paper and line drawings to create abstract pieces. Something I found really interesting was the different types of drawing, which was something I had never been taught before. This taught me that I need to focus more on what it is I am drawing, rather than trying to make it look how I want to on paper. 

This is an example of the blind drawing I did in class using black felt pen and graphite. I love the contrast in materials on this and I think the composition of the individual objects also works really well. 

This is a selection of my abstract pieces of work during the river project. These were done in preparation towards my final piece. The five piece series works well as a set, alrhough they are unsuccessful as being abstract as you can still tell what they are. However, after using a viewfinder and focusing on a section in more detail, my A2 piece worked a lot better and looked like a more sophisticated abstract piece. Materials used here included ink, charcoal and oil pastel. 

My paper strip piece was also a challenge but I really like it as it looks quite illustrative and river-shaped. However, to make it more abstract I should have zoomed in on some of my work more so you were unable to tell what certain sections were. 

This is my finished fabric piece before it exhibited in the Dome. I found it interesting to use fabric as everything we had done previously was on paper, so the transition was a challenge at first. Something I find successful about this is the folded edges where card was stuck underneath. These make really good rippling effects. I also really like the abstract look of the lines at the top half of the piece, whereas the bottom is less so, which would need improvement.

Below is my fabric piece alongside others in the Dome. As a set I think they looked really successful. The meandering of the printed blue letters worked really well to represent the water.