Chapter 2 :Design Work

It's been a very long time since I added anything to my blog: the discipline of little and often had quite left me. Hopefully I'm now out of that rut and back into the creative groove.  A trip to the Forum in Norwich this morning has helped.  "Turn the Page artists' book fair 2014" was on: such a wonderful and inspiring exhibition.  The makers only too pleased to discuss their work and allow their books to be handled.

Yet another lull, internet issues a World War 1 commemoration project, a friend's grief . . .

So again here goes . . .

Sian suggested I go with my heart when choosing a selection of images to work with and take my colour scheme from there: ice-blue, cool light grey, dark grey and warm browns.  A feeling of depth and shadow contrasting with lightness and a gleam on edges was something that also struck me about these images. There is a sense of mystery attached to spiral staircases, echoes of T.S. Eliot, though I've yet to find the exact quote I think I recall.

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On closer examination  I also saw deeper shades of petrol blue and copper and gilt tints.  The image below shows a colour matching exercise where I tried to find exact colour matches in magazines and then by mixing acrylics and water colours.  Water colours gave a nice translucence and a bronze metallic rub-on provided the gilt.

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 The papers below are worked on tissue, cartridge and brown paper with acrylic paint, including metallic, ink and crayon using a range of techniques -- spraying, sponging, wiping and rubbing.  In some cases several techniques layered on top of each other.

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Sian also asked me to notice how each example uses spiral in a slightly different way.  So following an internet investigation and discovering a world of (at least to me) advanced maths I'll start with the University of East Anglia spiral staircase from one of my Photo-shopped images -- this is an Archimedes spiral, a 3D spiral on a vertical plane, the spiral travelling counter clockwise.  All the rotations are the same size.

The three other spiral staircases are also examples of Archimedes spirals, and 3D on a vertical plane.  They differ, however, in respect of the size of each rotation -- some large to small, others small to large.