Found poetry pt 2: the otter saga

AN obsession with otters…

Midsummer 365 Projects

Or the day my phone turned into a needy surrealist and developed an obsession with otters!

this is what you get if you google surrealist otters… It is by Caleb Brown and I think it is awesome!! (click on it for more info!)

In case the title of the post didn’t give it away, I have been experimentinf further with this predictive text found poetry idea. I have had some quite interesting results.

There are quite a lot that don’t work, you get an endless string of “I have not I have I want to no seem…” etc but I have discovered that the way to avoid this is to play with the rules. In traditional found poetry you can take words from a page or pages and put them together, this allows a degree of selection of words. So in the construction of these predictive text versions I am allowed…

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Found Poetry pt 1

I first posted this on my fitness blog, but i think it also belongs here, peotry is an art form too after all.
(I am not sure my poetry is…but in general..)

Midsummer 365 Projects

I have discovered and rapidly become obessed with found poetry. If you aren’t aware of found poetry, it is using words and phrases you find in certain placecs to make a poem. This is how wikipedia describes it:

“Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry (a literaryequivalent of a collage) by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning.”

This whole voyage of discovery came out of a conversation with the lovely Lucy from  PorterGirl about auto correct and predictive text. So for my first venture into found poetry I decided to use only the words suggested by my phone’s predictive text:

I am not sure if it is true or not
I am not sure if I am a good…

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Ad-van-tures in lino printing

My third foray into lino cutting and printing is an homage to the iconic Volkswagen T25 campervan. More to the point…an homage, and possible means of making accessories for and decorating our iconic Volkswagen T25 campervan. After all…it is extremely hard to find things with pictures of T25s on… people seem to only make Items with Split screen vans and Bays on them, which are lovely and everything, but not right for us.

This is the one:

I followed the same process as in my last post,  and used a photo as the basis for the cut and then transferred it to lino, or in this case soft-cut material which is a plastic version.

Work in progress…

And the finished product…

I had a go at something different this time too. I tried out printing on to fabric. I know if I want to donfabric I will need specialist fabric ink but I wanted to see what it looked like 🙂

I like them, I am considering making canvas bags with the design on, once I have sourced the correct materials.

Further adventures in lino printing

After my initial reasonably successful foray into the world of lino cutting and printing, I decided I wanted to try something more ambitious…

The only tiny disadvantage I could think of when it came to this was the fact that I can’t draw very well…I can do abstract, and I can do patterns and I can see pictures, I just can’t make my hand put them down the way I want…so I came up with an alternate plan…I decided to use my photos, process them until I can only see outlines then transfer them to lino 😀

These are the two I used for my first experimentation…

Transferring them to lino wasn’t as easy as I anticipated, I eventually settled on the “press really hard with biro then fill in the groove” method which I am sure is not a recognised one but it worked!

This is what the transfer / cutting process looks like.

And this is the outcome…

I learned a few things from this, firstly I need to work on not pressing quite as hard when i am cutting the lino, my lines come out a little bit think in quite a lot of places. Secondly I think that the photo of fewer beach huts works better, I think this is because it has greater tonal variation and interest in the photo. I was convinced it would be the other one repetition works very well as a photo…

It is good to try these things and learn for next time 😀

 

New adventures in lino Printing

Good morning people of the world!

I can’t quite believe I have neglected my creative side again for so long!! I haven’t entirely neglected it to be fair, but it has taken a bit of a back seat to my exercise-y side…

(If you want more info about that go look here: http://www.midsummer365project/Wordpress.com)

Anyway…as you might have guessed from the title, this post is about lino cutting and printing. I have been dabbling in the printing / image transfer already in the form of acrylic media transfer . I can’t remember exactly how this led me down the route of lino cutting, but there was some combination of reading books on printmaking and image transfer and pinterest searching which lead me to ask for a lino cutting beginner set for my birthday. This gave me everything I needed to have a go 😀

These are the things I learned during my first foray into the art…

• Getting the line to stay the same size, depth and direction is a lot harder than you first think!!
• There are a lot of different cutters that have uses that are totally beyond my comprehension…but I have a book about it now so it should all resolve its self soon…
• There are more different types of lino and fake lino than I had realised
• straight lines are easier than curves

The most important thing I learned however is…

Lino cutting and printing is so much fun and I love it!! 

This is the outcome of my first foray… lots of room for improvement…but that is why we practice!

Practice piece to see what the cuts look like!

Super squiggly!

Doorways…

I love doors and doorways… It is something of a current obsession of mine…So I have started a photo project looking at doors and doorways and gates 🙂

I am hoping to take it into other media too, I think doors and gates would lend themselves to lino cutting very well,  they could be my first ventures into cyanotype printing…

So what is it about doorways I hear you asking…well, they are fascinating. Don’t you ever wonder what lies beyond a door?  It is the door that finally completes the barrier you erect with the walls of your house, it is the door that allows you and other people to pass between your domain and the real world!

A closed door or an unexplored gateway is a mystery, it is the entrance to a potential new world! Who know what goes on behind it!

Embroidery the Royal School of Needlework way

Last summer a friend and I went on an embroidery course run by the Royal School of Needlework in Hampton Court on the outskirts of London. It was an excellent day where I learned some stitches i didn’t know already and how to start and finish and generally embroider the Royal School of Needlework way! Don’t get me wrong…I will never be as good as the graduates of the School who often go on to work on royal wedding dresses and other such things but it was certainly interesting to get an insight into how they worked.
On the day I started a piece of embroidery that I got to take away to finish…and earlier this year I finished it…ok I know it should not have taken quite that long but i have a lot of things going on at the same time.

Here is the finished product…

Now I have to figure out the best way to mount and display it in my house 🙂

next project based on these new skills is to design my own piece of embroidery. I am thinking

embroidered versions of patterns like this…this will take some thinking about..