One for the lampworkers today. I was really rather pleased with my simple solution to videoing myself whilst lampworking, clearly my hands are busy, and I don’t always have an assistant handy, and it isn’t the easiest thing to film as I move around a lot and the camera struggles to keep continual focus. Theres also the further problem of soda flare, (thats the big yellow flare you get when you introduce soda-lime glass into the flame, it makes it very difficult to see, I’m wearing special safety specs with a filter for my eyes, but that doesn’t help the camera)
So this is not so much teach, as show…one didymium screen, one smart phone, three rubber bands. result: nice steady shot, plus no yellow soda flare, added bonus of my smartphone being protected from any flying bits of glass.
I’m well aware that not all of you have a didymium sreen as they are quite pricey, but I like to think this is a way to squeeze some extra value from mine!
set upwide shot
Day 18 Make something and trade it for something you want.
I made some porcelain Hare beads, I’ve arranged a little swap with a friend for some of her ceramic beads. These will not be finished for a little while as they need firing.
porcelain haresporcelain hares
Day 19 Make something for another #CreativeSprint-er.
I’ve not really been interacting much with the facebook group, so theres no one person I would make something for, I decided, I would make something for everyone, this little video of the sea
Day 20 Find a creative way to give someone a compliment.
Today is a beautiful Autumn afternoon…so I went for a walk
A message for youA message for you – from higher up
Day 12 choose an activity you normally do today, and do it backwards
Ok, so I can’t un-melt glass, and un-make a bead…but I can reverse my hands.
As a very specific handed lampworker, that is, I have my tools & glass in my right hand and my mandrel in my left . I know several other lampworkers who switch hands for tasks such as marvering (that is rolling a hot bead across a flat surface to flatten or otherwise shape it), I don’t. The mandrel always stays in my left hand.
so first, a simple bead made my normal way round, but I have increased the video speed:
(a very quick and badly edited video, the programme keeps crashing!)
and then switching hands:
this goes lots slower because of the extra thinking involved, and the unfamiliar angles.
the blue one is my left-handed bead, the turquoise my right -handed one.
left and right beads
Day 13 Use the front page of a newspaper or magazine as your materials or inspiration today
I always wanted to try this image transfer thing, again, never got round to it, well, todays the day!
Cover Image
The actual cover of this one didn’t work, but helpfully they’d printed a mini version on one of the pages inside
smileMarilyn
I think I’d like to work back into these at some point, but I haven’t decided how yet.
Day 14 Walk for 5 minutes with no specific destination in mind, make something with or inspired whats available where you end up.
I ended up at a park, and these are some of the things I found there:
Autumn coloursand a berry
I had hoped to make a drawing or some other collage type piece featuring these, I particularly liked the feather and the red berry. I need more time for that. so for now, you just get some arranged items.
(yes, I missed 11, which was ‘spill something and make something with, or inspired by the mess’ , well, tough. I’m not perfect, so much so I spill enough stuff not on purpose and generally just get cross with myself, it does not put me in a creative mood.)
Day 8 recreate or interpret a work of art you admire
it often comes back to the great wave.
promarkers on watercolour paper. I left out Fuji and the boat, because to me its always only about the wave.
The Wave
Day 9 break something, and make something new with the parts
This necklace…its just weird. but I kind of liked some of the parts, so I always meant to take it apart, just never got around to it, (oh and it has feathers on it, so it fits with my theme nicely, which the above doesn’t, but we don’t need to talk about that!)
Strange Necklace
The bright gold plated with the antique gold plated at the front just looked very odd to me, and that nasty plastic pearl and tacky peace charm have to go
Pile of PartsWIP
and heres the finished necklace, I only added a few jumprings, callottes and clasp, all the beads, chain and feather components were from the original.
Necklace 2
I might make something with the rest of the bits at some point, and I’m not especially keen on using plated metals at all, but sometimes it works. I do like those bronzey black shades together, and the blue gives the whole thing a lift.
Day 10 make something inspired by your favourite childhood game
When I was a kid, we had real games, it wasn’t all computers and things that go on inside a screen. screens were pretty rubbish then anyhow. (and batteries, and single games at a time because you actually had to load a games cartridge into it! Oh, and a complete and total lack of internet…)
I remember several games with marbles, bagatelle, mousetrap, hungry hungry hippos (though maybe that was plastic balls?)
Speaking of, have you seen the human version? (if not, go to youtube!) it involves skateboards and washing up bowls/laundry baskets and probably a fair few bruises, but it looks like fun!
So anyway, I decided to make a marble. The best ones were always the ones with swirls of coloured glass inside, but instead of recreating one of those, I’ve taken it a step further and tried to recreate a swirl of feathers.
I know I’m super behind now, though these were actually done on time, I have been having internet connection issues to say the least. I have tried several times to upload these pictures, and even just now its taken two or three attempts.
Day 6
Make something with your eyes closed
I don’t need to explain why it would be insanity to make something lampworked with my eyes closed, so I drew these instead….
eyes shut
the wings on the left hand side of the line were drawn with my eyes open, then I tried to recreate them with my eyes closed
Day 7
Something inspired by a guilty pleasure
There is a TV show I like to watch, I found myself rather fascinated by this actresses eyes when I watched it recently, so …
well I don’t use pockets much, so that leaves my bag. technically I had a bag of threads and things in there to make tassles with, but that didn’t seem very imaginative since I already planned to do it, and I didn’t have the rest of the things I need to complete the earrings, it would just be a tassle.
so that leaves (unusually for me!) my make-up bag.
Make-up Birds
Since birds and feathers are my theme, I started by smudging shapes of foundation onto my page, I also added some lip balm but that doesn’t really show, the mascara just caused mess (when doesn’t it? ) and the eyeliner lost its point extremely quickly. The lipstick bird on the bottom left I scratched into with tweezers, but it doesn’t show up that well.
Day 5
Containers.
Recently I got my hands on some porcelain, and I’ve had various ideas for things flying around in my head, but no idea which to start with.
With the theme containers, the thought came to me that I could try one of the candle holder ideas I’d had. except none of them were very ‘birdy’ so I came up with a new one!
This sentence from Raven Steals the Light, Legends of the First Peoples of the Pacific Northwest appealed to me,
‘Raven stole the sun from the Sky Chief and gave it to all the people, though his snow-white feathers were burned black by the heat of the sun’
The candle, the smoke, and maybe some matte black glaze or oxides when its fired I think would work very well.
however, it dried out too quickly and cracked, so I guess I’ll be re-making it!
Creative Sprint – a 30 day creativity challenge. I signed up ages ago, and forgot really, so I wasn’t exactly prepared when the first email landed in my inbox!
For those who can’t be bothered to go to the website (really, just click it!) I get a daily email with a theme or task designed to exercise the creativity muscles
I’m going to condense my tasks into grouped blog posts, partly because I’m already a little behind, and partly because I’m sure some of these will be pretty brief!
Day 1 – fits in your Palm
paper feather
My initial plan was to make an origami bird, though its never been something I’m good at, they turned out far too big and unbirdlike, and thats just the ones that got finished! Either I’m not good at following instructions, or they weren’t very clear. Likely a bit of both. and I wasn’t entirely happy about ‘creating’ from instructions, rather than from my own head. so I went back a step, something small, and simple. The paper I’m using is the sheet from underneath a mandala drawing I did recently, where the pens bled through.
Day Two – Letters of my Name
Madeline Gemstone Earrings
This was quite the challenge I set myself! spelling out my name in gemstones, fine, but gemstones I can get hold of (thankyou job at Monty’s Beads for making that one much easier!) and that look nice together, sizes, shapes and colours? Trickier.
I finally settled on the following:
Moonstone, Amethyst, Druzy, Emerald, Labradorite, Iolite, Nephrite Jade and Emerald again (yes ok, maybe there should be at least two, but they’re big ok? and yes, Maybe the M should be the big bead…well some other time maybe!) Some other options were white moonstone rather than the orange, lapis, dalmation jasper, malachite and apatite. There were very few options for I, E and N, in fact none that I could get my hands on in time.
I’ve been meaning to do this type of simple wire wrap for some time, the one on the emerald, but it didn’t work that well with the random rough shapes, I still struggle with rustic! The emeralds also make these far too heavy, I’ll likely re-make these without those big emeralds and I know that will just make them Madlin, but I’m ok with that, as I like the colour combination so much, even though, or perhaps especially because it’s so unusual, and I most definitely would not have come up with it any other way!
Day 3 – Faces
This one made me smile to myself, a few days ago a friend did this:
feet faces
The strangest thing about this photo (and nobody noticed!) is that I’m wearing a PAIR of socks. Those who know me, know this is rare.
so as for faces I created…
tool faces
I was at work on my lunch break when I got the email, I looked up and saw some tools on the opposite bench, I didn’t have googly eyes to hand, which would have been the easy and fun way to do this, or I could have taken pictures and digitally painted them in…but I didn’t.
so I drew them later.
In the initial email, it said that you could choose a theme to stick to with your challenges. You might see mine emerging…
A little while ago, I went to London, to visit my Best Friend in the world, we had ourselves a deliciously art filled feast for the eyes.
Destinations included the Tate Modern and the V&A, we also had a look at the Southbank Gallery and Skylark 1 & 2 at Gabriel’s Wharf, and the OXO tower, had a lovely talk with an artist at skylark, the piece ‘balance’ I liked, and not just because that is one of my favourite words.
This piece includes silver leaf, which as she expained to us, will tarnish over time, giving the piece an evolving feel, it changes with you, and grows, becomes something more than it started.
I’d like to Thank Gill, for being both interesting, and interested! We were made to feel very welcome in this small artfilled space, something which not all gallery owners and shop keepers are good at. It seems all to easy for some to assume that people are ‘just browsing’ and not buying, and lose interest in you, as if all they care about is your money (or lack thereof). (It probably doesn’t help if you go around looking like an art student, but what do they say about judging a book by its cover?)
The featured artist was Colin Ruffell, The style and the colours in this print spoke to me, those exciting bursts of orangey red against the turquoise shades…yum!
Colin Ruffell – 1st Dec LONDON SKYLINE http://www.crabfish.com http://www.colinruffell.com
Mainly London landscapes, many featuring the cranes that seem to be a constant feature of London’s ever changing skyline. I feel I need some sort of time lapse video here…oh Thanks Youtube, don’t mind if I do!
This brings me to my own photos, our walk along the Southbank to the Tate modern, complete with a fair few cranes!
London Skyline
This is what I was actually photographing (well trying to!) the outer edges of this cloud looked like it had been drawn on.
St Pauls from the SouthbankSilver Birches at the Tate Modern
These silver birches were just saplings the first time I visited the Tate modern, many years ago, when my memories of it included the large eye spinning op-art paintings of Bridget Riley.
This was the first time I’ve visited the Tate modern since being an art student, where you were expected to look, read, and worst of all document your experiences…
You HAD to see this or that exhibit, and you had to do it all in very little time too. You spend so much time wrapped up in this bit, its easy to not actually look properly, and experience fully, rather like watching something happen through the lens (or indeed digital display screen) of a camera.
Visiting by choice was a different experience, without the pressure to fill a notebook up with pointless comments, rubbish sketches and writing down all the titles and dates and things. (these days no doubt you’d also be filling up your smart phone with rubbish blurry pictures inside galleries too…smart phones weren’t really a thing when I went as a student, we had pretty rubbish digital cameras instead)
and yet here I am, documenting, by choice, my experiences and thoughts on some of the pieces! (though I think if I had been able to use the medium of a blog, I might have done better!)
Unfortunately, since I was busy enjoying it all in this no pressure way, the piece I liked most (from the monochrome exhibit) I completely failed to get the artists name, date or anything about it! Though with a little googling later I found this sentence, which some other art student had faithfully copied down from the plaque on the wall. (or more likely, snapped with their smartphone and typed up later!)
“this work was constructed by a carpenter and a gold leaf artisan who were given instructions by the artist on the telephone”
and a search for gold leaf on the Tate website brings me to this: Mathias Goeritz 1915–1990 Title ‘Message’ Date: c.1959 Medium:Gold leaf on plywood panel Dimensions Support: 1219 x 1393 mm
Interestingly enough, the picture is not displayed on the Tate’s website ‘due to copyright restrictions’, however, I’m pleased about that, as I don’t think any photo could do this piece justice, you just have to go and be there.
The piece was very simple in contruction, a large board, covered with gold leaf.
The gold leaf itself was not 100% even, showing through in patches to a brick red, like a gilt frame sometimes does, giving a sort of rustic, antiqued effect.
Once again this piece was so much more than that, its size and placement on the wall meant that your reflection (and that of others in this fairly small, almost corridor of a gallery room) took up about a third of the canvas, the reflections themselves were not true mirror reflections, but softened, almost more like moving shadows, like a window into another, quieter, more muted world. In this respect you felt like you were being made a part of the ever changing work, you were included, involved.
Picasso’s three dancers will always stick in my memory, as we did a whole project on it, with a tutor who absolutely raved about it.
To see it from afar (its rather big!), and then up close, with its different paint textures and erm, ‘interesting’ colours was fascinating, however…I still don’t like it!
Something else I found intriguing was watching people looking at the works, you could only get near to Salvador Dali’s ‘Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ by waiting and then taking your space, viewing from further away was out of the question. And I’m sure, had someone been watching me looking up at Alexander Calder’s ‘Mobile’ they must have wondered what was going through my head.
Balance, is the answer to that. The effects of gravity on shapes, counterweights, the gentle movement with air currents, and how I can use some of these effects in my jewellery pieces, where gravity is the constant enemy to the heavily assymmetric designs in my head, and glass which, try as I might, weighs what it weighs, and will literally try to take centre stage.
By the time we got to the Rothko room, the atmosphere and heat had given us both a headache, so I have yet to experience whatever it is you are meant to experience when you sit in a slightly darkened room surrounded by giant canvases of burgundy.
Angry Skies
Some fresh air outside, and the weather was changing fast. It brought the kind of rain I could just stand in, and get soaked, the rain that falls from heavy humid skies onto dry ground. Probably best not to though, sitting on the tube in somewhat damp clothes isn’t likely to be a wonderful experience!
I think I’ll leave it there, perhaps I’ll tell you about the V&A in another post sometime.
My dearest Friend incidentally, is an artist herself (you may have guessed by our art filled activities!)
And you should most definitely, check out her work! The best place for this in my opinion is her facebook page or SoulbirdArt on instagram, where she often posts work in progress shots which I find wonderful, like an insight into her studio, her workspace, her mind…Enjoy!
a beautiful work in progress, by Roberta Orpwood
oh, and one more little thing…
valid throughout the facebook showcase (27/06/2015 – 30/06/2015) and from now until 02/07/2015 in my etsy shop
www.madelinebunyan.com 