The Road Not Taken

I am doing a Master Practitioner course with the School of Stitched Textiles.   The tutor suggested I might challenge myself to work with brighter colours than I usually use.  The first module uses a poem and a piece of music of my choice as the inspiration.

For the poem I have chosen The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost.

The poem speaks of a yellow wood and my research led me to the fact that this might be birch trees or alder trees.  I was surprised at this as I have visited one of Frost's homes in New England.  Plus the poem was written for Frost's friend Edward Thomas who is English.

However, a piece on the BBC Countryfile programme solved the riddle.  Robert Frost and his family lived in the Cotswolds in England with Edward Thomas and his family living just across the fields.  They obviously walked in English woods.

I decided to concentrate on birch leaves - a decision helped by the fact that we have a silver birch tree at the bottom of our garden with a large sycamore behind it.

I started with some mark making on a large piece of paper.  I was aiming for the two paths diverging in the woods which the marks do represent but also look like branches and twigs.

I had a go at monoprinting with tree stencils designed by Valerie Sjodin.  Taking up the challenge to work in brighter colours I started with yellow and oranges.

Before I tore these up I scanned them into my computer and printed out smaller versions of the prints.   I collaged them into my sketchbook.

Then I moved on to using leaves.  I'll show you those in my next post.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice