Paper Making

To say that paper making has taken over my life this week is a bit of an understatement, I am covered in the stuff!

I only discovered the art of paper making this year and my very lovely house mate lent me the materials and tough me the basics. Like all things at first I was pretty rubbish and the paper that I was making (if you could call it paper!!), was pretty blobby and not really paper like at all. after many attempts at making different consistencies of mulch, I eventually was starting to make something that resembled paper.

It such a good way to use up all the small scraps of paper that I could never really use for anything. although its a very long and mucky process, its totally worth it for the beautiful paper you can make that is completely unique. Im going to try and use some of mine on cards and for some of my bookmaking experiments.

You will be seeing some of my hand made paper in some of the new stuff I am currently working on, so keep your eyes open as I will be posting them soon!!

A Bigger Picture

Hello lovelies!

Collage; my preferred ways to make use of old magazines. If you are anything like me then you will be trying to keep up with the latest celeb gossip, my favourite way to do this is stocking up on magazines. I'm sure some people read every word of a magazine and study it until they have got their two pounds worth, but me, on the other hand, I like to just flick through and look at the pictures!! This does mean that I end up with piles and piles of old magazines. Being a bit of a self confessed hoarder I just can't bring my self to through them out... you just never know when you might need them for a project!

SO eventually I found a good use for some of my vast collection of magazines. My wardrobe in my bedroom is getting on a bit now and I was pretty board of just painting it so I thought I would try a collage of magazine pages to cover the doors to see how it looked. I just tacked them at first with blue tack to see and the result was pretty cool. Collage is so free I could get away with using different sized pages, a mix of fashion shoots, adverts I liked, whatever page caught my eye. I was so keen on the result I decided to take the whole thing one step further and paper-past them to the wardrobe! Best thing to make this a permanent installation and keeps it looking fresh and undamaged.

I think collage is a really good way to cover up a tired piece of furniture and gives a fresh new life to it! Don't be scared, get your paper-past out and dig out your old pile of magazines and have a go at revamping some of your furniture and see what you can bring back to life!

Mark Hearld's Individual Style

Well I said that I was going to be writing about some artist that I love and this (I hope!) will be the first of many!

Recently I discovered the work of Mark Hearld. Born in 1974, Mark studied illustration at Glasgow College of Art and then completed an MA in Natural History Illustration at the Royal College of Art. His work directly reflects this extended and specific education.

Mark Hearld’s art works combines his individual style of collage, printmaking and mark making. His compositions also reflect his distinctive style.

Many of his images are created by building up layers. Firstly collage, secondly mark making and finally a linocut. The last layer, the linocut, feels like a seal on the image or a stamp of approval.  Perhaps this helps him to stop playing with an image any longer, and to complete it, an issue I have with my our own work from time to time. As a body of work, he mixes linocuts with his own pattern making. The use of repeated patterns is a constant theme throughout his work. He uses both marks and collage to make an image appear patterned and textured. Although he does not draw each feather individually on the owl, the pattern gives the impression of being very detailed.

 

His love of nature and all things natural is not only expressed in his subject matter, but it expands into his mark making and the patterns used in his images. This makes all of his images unique and very distinctive. His love of nature may also link to why His work is exclusively hand generated and he does not use programs such as Illustrator or Photoshop to enrich his work. Therefore his work has a tendency to look flat and not very three-dimensional, this is very clear in the body of the bird and the chest and face are very flat, however the wings are richly textured. We see an alternative method Hearld uses to add a third dimension to otherwise very flat images. 

As a young artist his work is bound to grow, expand and change and he may in later work start to use computer programs to enrich his style. However, I almost hope he doesn't; I hope he sticks to what he knows, because we are in danger of all graphic design becoming computerised and people forgetting about beautiful hand rendered techniques such as printmaking and painting. 

I love his work and how free each individual artwork feels, in both pattern and collage. I have added some of my own work at the end of this post, all have been inspired by Hearld's work, especially his 3D birds and I hope to be adding more things in the future to this blog in the same style! 

My First Post... Here Goes!

As my second year of university has just finished, and I have moved back home for the summer I wanted to do something productive and keep my mind well oiled, all ready for 3rd year (Already in complete denial about it being my final year of uni!) 

So this blog will be full of everything from reviews of artists I love, things I have recently made and some of my latest illustrations and designs.

I hope you enjoy what I have to say and like my work! Feel free to get in touch with any question or even just for a chat!!