Free Up Your Sketchbook

It took me a while to decide whether or not to sign up for Karen Stamper's Free Up Your Sketchbook and Grow.  I have done classes with her before both online and in-person.  You might have see my Venice book or the start of a canal one.  I don't think I ever blogged about the finished book.

So I wasn't sure whether Free Up Your Sketchbook was relevant three or four years on.  I've done so much more textile work in the meantime and I wondered how this course could help me. But in the end I decided to go with it.

Here are my week 1 pages using pencil, inks, gesso and other media.

The idea is to work back into these pages as the course continues over the next 5 weeks.  I'll keep you updated.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Collage and a poem

Continuing with Visual Narratives I started playing with the photos I had printed out which I mentioned in my last post.

I cut up a sheet that I had intended to be a zine to make snapshots of marks.  I put them into my sketchbook.

Then I tried making collages with  the different surfaces - paper, tracing paper and ohp film.

They're not totally me.

I had also printed one page of photos onto address labels. I peeled some of them off and put them in my book.

I also took words I had found and wrote them on the page using ink and then added water.

These sentences are part of a poem I wrote about canals using the phrases and words I had found in the book Canals: The Making of a Nation by Liz McIvor

The Cut
I was once a stark man-made corridor
Cut by sweaty, swearing navvies.
Now a ribbon of calm, spiralling out from the centre of the city.
Cutting lines through scarred landscapes
And meandering through verdant countryside.
Iron bridges tower over me
Looped lines from shadow lattice patterns
Fall on my surface
Disturbed by ripples from coots and moorhens
As they scurry into my reeded banks.

 
Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

Lots of playing with photos

I have been playing with online editing of a few of my canal photos.  I use a free online editor called Lunapic.  As well as Microsoft Publisher. This post has a lot of photos.  And I mean A LOT!

I used these photos

And now - drum roll please - the edited ones

I also made up several A4 sheets of assorted photos like this one

I have folded these A4 sheets into zines.  I love zines as you can tell

I also printed onto tracing paper and ohp acetate sheets.  Lots of collage fodder ready to work in my sketchbook.

Well done if you got this far.  Actually I only put 19 photos after all.  Fairly average number for me!!!

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice