Kandinsky (M3 Chpt3)

Introduction

Despite not being the greatest fan of Kandinsky's work, I actually enjoyed this chapter much more than I'd anticipated. I used the technique suggested by Viv; ie painting sheets of paper with acrylics and making a collage type picture. This was undoubtedly a really useful technique to learn and I'll revisit this again. It got rid of any problems working with  subtle changes in colour and allowed for really clear and bright pictures.

I had a good look on the internet for pieces of Kandinsky's work I liked and thought would be good to try out:

I decided on two images to work with

1. Blue Kandinsky

I started making sheets of coloured paper:

Then cut out some some shapes and started to lay these out onto a blue grey base:

Kandinskys original design (ish). I cropped the image, hoping to retain the overall composition:

Then making a few changes:

Glued down and lines going on:

Completed:

2. Bisecting Circles:

The painting I had chosen was clearly too complicated to be achievable on a small scale so I cropped the image to a workable size:

Then as before painted up sheets of paper. I worked on a base of pale umber mixed with white.

Laying down shapes and circles:

Once I had laid the shapes down and glued them. I took a sheet of tracing paper and laid this over the top to try out lines before committing to them. I made a rough frame around the outside. First go:

I thought the right vertical was too dominant for the composition so retried this: I preferred the second attempt.

The finished piece:

Finally I made an edit of the image and focused in on a particular section because I thought it worked really well.

Creating Movement with Line (M3, Chpt 2)

Introduction

Moving on quickly from Chapter 1 while the momentum was still with me and the weather was unremittingly awful.....

Again using my Nikon camera I found the general dark conditions,even with the lights on, led to rather shadowy images, I've tried to lighten these so some images may appear a little washed out. Apologies.

Activity 3.2.1
As suggested I went through this activity using a variety of pens, although I forgot to use only black in some examples and used dark blue. 

For the first two exercises I used a very fine pen:

Evenly (ish) spaced parallel lines

I changed pen for making wiggly lines,  but was not very impressed with the texture of the lines, so re-did the exercise in dark blue ink using the eyeliner thing I used in the last chapter:

Straight step lines: I tried this out with the same techniques as for the wiggly lines. The eyeliner brush example was really quite interesting as the varying weight of ink worked well for this exercise:

Zigzag lines: Using a calligraphy felt tip pen and both the broad and fine edges of the nib to create first an even diagonal step pattern then a less regimented pattern:

Adding small bulges to a line: back to a medium nib liner pen, then a brush pen for this exercise. The brush pen produced the more interesting rhythm. Reminded me of a 1960s textile pattern (Maija Isola):

Wavy lines: I made a few examples in brush pen, then another using my eyeliner pen, not much difference in the two. One pattern I worked on wavy lines veering right as opposed to up and down:

Dots and lines: Using thick and thin pens didn't produce anything particularly inspiring:

Occasional bumps using the eyeliner applicator (eventually I found the right word for it):

Working around rectangles: although only doing one example for this, I think this idea certainly had more possibilities, for me, than the previous exercise.  It would be possible to create some really interesting angles. At the bottom of the page a few more conversational ideas I quickly tried out:

A couple of ideas I tried out:

By making even and opposing notches on a straight line, it's possible to create a  (more or less) repeating pattern:

Activity 3.2.2 Op Art

Largely inspired by Bridgit Riley for this activity, I started with some patterns and stripes:

and...

Then I tried out a vortex with two spheres. I wanted also to use increasing depth of colour towards the centre of the page to give a sense of depth.. First issue was the need for an odd number of sections to ensure that the pattern worked. Had to give up on my first go at this:

Second attempt sort of worked: 

I went back a step and  concentrated on creating an optical sphere. This worked quite well:

Then re-did this circle on a background of radiating lines. Confusing in a good way:

Finally trying out the same pattern in squares with colour of varying depth to increase the optical illusion:

It's astonishing what you can do with a few lines! Now on to Kandinsky...