Inspiring porcelain

I had to show some photos of the work of a good friend of mine, Jo Wood, after my husband bought me one of her lamps recently.

The detail in her pleating of the clay is stunning, especially in the evening when the light is on and the translucency is apparent. She normally works in white but did this with hints of blue as I have a love of blues.

I love this previous piece. It has a greenish verdigris look to the pleating not so apparent in this photo.

Her work is amazing and she has justifiably won awards in Australia. But she is never one to push herself into the limelight, so I'm doing it for you, Jo!.

You can see more of her work and contact her here or if local to Sydney visit Kerry Lowe's gallery in Newtown.

Colouring fabric

I've gone for the fibre reactive Procion dye route as my selection of disperse dyes is limited to say the least. I won't bore you with process details (all that's in my technical notes / diary) but suffice to say the fabrics and fibres for each dyelot were dyed in buckets containing about 500ml liquid over 2-3 hours.

I dyed a range of cottons (homespun, muslin, voile, gauze, brushed cotton) and a piece of canvas and Saa bark along with perle 5 and 8 cotton threads and cotton knitting fibre.

Here are the yellow and greens, with the original papers in the centre (excuse the dirty patio stones in the background). The dark threads on the ochre pile were from a previous dyeing.

5.5

And here are the pinks and browns. The initial light coral samples (8 o'clock in the photo) I felt were too strong so I dyed a new lot which look more subtle (6 o'clock in photo)

5.6

Within each batch there is the expected shade variation with different fabrics but I was most surprised with the differences between the resulting colours of a cotton cheesecloth and a silk chiffon (lower fabric in each photo 5.7 and 5.8) dyed in the same bath.
The two greens on the right of the 5.7 had various dye powders in the mix including green, olive and black and each fabric type obviously takes then up to different extents.

5.7

5.8

I kept the spent dye liquids for use in preparing decorated papers in later designing in Module 1.

Colour weavings and groupings

Initially looked at how the eight or so selected colours blended together by weaving them, first all together and then in selected groupings in varying amounts.

5.2

Then examined the same colour range on different surfaces, some with texture.

5.3

Each colour swatch placed on each background.

5.4

Then 2 new backgrounds, shades of blue, were examined.

5.5

Colour Study

Slowly I'm getting my work into some kind of presentation on A3 for the formal sketchbook. I've looked at various photos to achieve suitable ranges of different hues and decided upon one from the very start of my research. The leaves on this one plant changed from a bright magenta through to bright green, and should give me a good range to work from.

5.1