Chiaroscuro Exhibition

October 30, 2013creativityDiverse Manners, exhibition, wallhangingLiz Plummer

It’s been an age since I wrote anything in this blog – life has been rather stressful family-wise and I’ve been doing my best to keep up (and catch up!) with Module 2 of the pattern course I’m doing.

DS1 is currently on a backpacking holiday round the world so September was spent helping him prepare for that – he spent the first month ‘doing’ Eastern Europe and flew to Kathmandu earlier this week. He is planning to travel around Nepal, India, Thailand and a few other places before ending up in Perth, Australia in the New Year when he hopes to get work to fund more travel! He has a blog which is quite entertaining.

Chiaroscuro, the exhibition I mentioned in my last post opened today and the opening night starts at 7pm tonight – if you live locally (South Wales) you’d be very welcome to come along to chat to the artists there! All the details are on our Facebook Page, including several photos of us putting the show up!

It’s on for 4 days until this Saturday, 2 November, 2pm – 8pm each day, Pontrhydrun Baptist Church, Cwmbran, NP44 2ND

Moyo Directory and Diverse Manners

August 15, 2013Patternsbunting, Diverse Manners, exhibition, moyo directory, pattern courseLiz Plummer

I’m looking forward to next Monday – Module 2 of the pattern course, The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design, is starting! I really enjoyed Module 1 and it got me designing again, drawing little sketches and playing with Photoshop (and cursing Illustrator!) and because I knew that the next module was coming it kept up the momentum over the summer. I could easily have been diverted and distracted by the presence of all three of my sons (or just been idle and got up at noon every day!). This next module is about branding – Creating your professional identity. So no doubt you will see lots of tweaks and changes here! You’ll notice, unless you are reading this from a blog reader, that I have changed the WordPress theme of the blog – please let me know if anything isn’t working for you. I’ve also installed a plugin to give you the choice of reading the blog in a more pared-down, mobile-friendly format on smartphones or tablets – it is supposed to be quicker to load (and, more importantly, uses less data if you’re on a mobile contract) but there is a button at the bottom to switch to the traditional browser layout if you don’t like it.

If you would like to see some of the patterns I’ve been creating, I have a profile page on the new Moyo Directory: here is a quick screenshot of part of it:

I would love it if you could click the ‘like’ button on the page when you visit!

Also at the end of October some of my textile work is going to be in an exhibition in Cwmbran (near where I live) as part of the Diverse Manners Arts Group annual exhibition – if you would like to be notified when it is happening, click on the link and ‘like’ our Facebook page which I helped set up earlier this year. The theme is Chiaroscuro which is an Italian art term for light and dark and I am exhibiting Birth of a City and also four smaller screenprints which I printed a while ago using a paper stencil (once I’ve stitched and mounted them!).

The exhibition is being held in a church and there is a nice tree-lined graveyard next to it with lots of space for bunting so in a mad moment last week I decided to make some and stencil the words ‘ART EXHIBITION’ on them. Here they are drying on the clothes horse:

Of course I couldn’t let all that spare paint go to waste, so I printed it randomly on this piece of dyed fabric!

And here is the rest of the bunting all piled up ready to be stitched together – so far I think I’ve got enough to wrap round the house several times and I’ve run out of bias binding so need to cut some more!

And finally, I couldn’t resist putting in this photo of a gorgeous lily growing in our garden – aren’t the colours yummy?

Patterns and blogging experiments

I’m just experimenting with using the WordPress app on my android tablet and if it is successful it will hopefully encourage me to get blogging again!

The ease of adding photos will be the crunch point to this experiment so let’s wait and see.

The last few weeks since the first module of my pattern course finished, I’ve been busy getting to grips with Photoshop and building more patterns. You can see one in the Graduate Showcase of the course on Rachael Taylor’s blog - I was so excited when it turned out to be the first one! It was based on a thermofax screen design I made from some Markmaking. Here it is:

This week we were excited to go up to Warwick University where DS1 was graduating from his degree in PPE – here he is in all his finery (sweltering in the heatwave!) with his proud parents :

Pattern crazy

June 22, 2013Patternscolour, Google Reader, pattern course, sketchbooks, studioLiz Plummer

Apologies for the lack of blog posts. I’ve been busy with the pattern course I talked about last month. Module 1 has finished but I’m still enthused by it and busy creating patterns and coming to grips with Photoshop. And observing patterns everywhere. Such as this row of colourful wellies outside a shop in one of the arcades in Cardiff…

I dug out all the various sketchbooks I had accumulated over the last few years and was a bit horrified that they filled three plastic crates! Of course, they are not all full…. some of these are pretty empty…. There are quite a few handmade books and some little ones that I made from watercolour paper and bound with my little blue Bind it all machine.

One of the things we’ve been learning to do on the course are moodboards – this isn’t strictly a moodboard but a collage of the images that grab me, made quickly and roughly in Picasa.

I have also been trying to add more colour and pattern to my studio – this had unforeseen consequences last week! I took down a pile of patterned fabric from the top shelves there and relocated them on to one of the lower shelves – which promptly fell off the wall! Luckily my precious thermofax machine, which was on that shelf, didn’t end up on the floor in pieces….

Remember if you use Google Reader to read this blog, that it is being shut down on 1st July so you will need to export all your subscriptions and save them on your computer. I like the look of Feedly as an alternative – if you log in with your Google account it pulls in your subscriptions automatically and it has now introduced its ‘cloud’ service so it will no longer be dependent on Google when it shuts down Google Reader but will pull in the feeds on its own servers. If you would like to get updates to this blog by email, you can do that by filling in your details on the form in the right sidebar and then you won’t miss a post or have to keep checking back to see if I have updated it! I use Mailchimp and as far as I can tell it works quite well and I promise not to send you any unrequested mail.

Pattern course and a bit of colour!

May 14, 2013Online coursescolour, Cornwall, London, newport, Paris, patternLiz Plummer

For the last few weeks I’ve been doing an online course called The Art and Business of Pattern Design. I decided to embark on this because I noticed that a lot of my artwork consists of lots of overall pattern and texture and I needed something to get me organised now that my boys are all flying the nest and I’ve got more time to set up a business in it!

I’m finding it really inspiring and you’ll probably see quite a lot of it popping up in the next few months but just now we’re doing colour and here are a few photos that I’ve dug out to get colour swatches from…. UPDATE: I added the swatches I got from them at the Color Palette Generator

colour-cornwall-cliff2

A cliff in Cornwall (didn’t do one for this as both the colour generators I tried seemed to ignore that gorgeous red/orange and green and focus on the browns/blacks of the rocks).

A building in Bloomsbury in London

Some graffiti near Brick Lane in London

Rainy pavements in London!

More rain!

Yes, it rained a lot that time…

Colourful containers in Newport

The Paris metro