Designing with Scissors

Recently I attended a 5 day retreat at Committed to Cloth led by Leslie Morgan.  It's a time to spend on your own work with input from Leslie whenever you need it.  She is very good at asking leading questions and helping to move your work in a totally different direction!

My theme for the retreat was taste and I had got the nursery rhyme oranges and lemons stuck in my head.  The starting point on the first day was mark making and so while I was thinking about oranges I printed with various different round objects.  These first two are on large sheets of brown paper.

I also liked using white acrylic paint on black paper.

Designing with Scissors
I started cutting circles out of one of the brown sheets and cutting those into segments.  There were some interesting shapes left over which I tried on top of the printing.  I worked on the black A3 paper in landscape format.

I printed some orange circles.

I tried turning the paper to portrait and added some more segments.

Leslie suggested I used some L shapes to test tightening up the composition.

I cut the sheet of black down to this.

The photos above and below show the design process which took place over two or three days with other design ideas going on at the same time.  It was so great to have a wallboard where I could pin things up and think about the pieces.  Sadly I don't have room at home for one.

In this series I had the piece of A3 black paper and was auditioning a diagonal line.   First I tried with some white ribbon.

Then I tried an orange line.

Then I looked at the composition with the L shapes again.

 

I cut the sheet down and made a triptych.  I auditioned the pieces in different places and different ways up until I was satisfied with the design.

This last version won!

I really enjoyed designing with scissors.  And a craft knife and ruler!   Whether anything I made ever gets to be a textile is open to question.

If you're interested there's a post about this retreat on my personal blog: Newly Creative.

Bernice