For Stage 2, I spent time working in my rust theme book to see which pages held potential. In Slovenia I had begun to photograph manhole covers and ended up with a lot of images. I cropped these in Picasa to find some interesting areas of pattern and created the photo collage below. I squared off a page in my book and made line drawings in random boxes until they were filled.
Some of the little drawings generated ideas.
The top two I related to the idea mentioned in my last post about using small interesting areas of rust print. I was thinking about the shapes of these scraps and how they might be attached or applied. I photographed my fabric and cut out and arranged shapes to see how they might look. This first one below, I'd like to try with further shapes applied on top. I like the idea of a simple curved shape contrasting with the straight lines, particularly a large ring that would frame a view and dissect the parallelograms. I think a complicated shape will be too distracting.
This second one is not as simple as it appears. The quadrilaterals have no parallel sides and are arranged in not quite straight lines. I cut and arranged the shapes by eye, leaving a border around each that was roughly even and trying to achieve a pleasing colour and pattern distribution. Working out the maths behind the shapes (are they bicentric?) might help me understand an easier way to make this pattern work. Both I can imagine as some sort of furnishing fabric and I began to think about the scale if used for something like a cushion or curtain panel.
The bottom drawing I imagined in stitch and I spent some time working out how best to construct it. I stitched a small sample and tried drawing some variations, playing with the length and direction of the stitch components. I particularly liked the uneven rows and the circular design. This I could see as a round cushion with rows of concentric stitches, becoming huge by the outer row. The stitch could possibly be embellishment for one of my other ideas and I also picture it used on a small scale, like in Shisha embroidery as a frame for something.
I then spent some more time working into a page I'd begun a few weeks ago when I was thinking about washers and rivets. I'd started by making prints using a button stuck to the end of a cork to make rusty washer-like marks and added further layers of circles and rings of different sizes. As I stuck down the photographs of angled washers at the bottom of the page, I imagined them on a huge scale as sculpture and was reminded of my visit to the Hepworth Gallery and the interesting views that were framed by the holes in Barbara Hepworth's work. Ideas on circles, holes and views are becoming a recurring theme for me in this project.
I always carry a camera with me now and I've begun to keep my images by theme: glass, moss, beach, Winter etc. These I pulled from my rust folder. I was interested by the shapes created by the perspective on the pier construction, particularly when I began to lay the images on top of each other. I experimented with the angles and imagined them simplified as quilt blocks. I decided though, that what was really inspiring me was the colours, so decided to look at the images and come up with a colour palette for this potential quilt.
I enjoyed this approach so thought I'd look through my theme book and create some further possible colour schemes for my project based on some of the pages.
By now, I felt I had enough potential ideas ready for development into a design during Stage 3.
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