Wouldn't it have been amazing to visit the Great Library of ancient Alexandria?! A library that held up to 400,000 scrolls & led to the city being heralded as the capital of knowledge & learning.
Well that ancient wonder may no longer exist, but it's modern version does & we were very VERY excited to visit it during our exploration of Egypt.
The current Library was inaugurated in 2002 and as well as having space for 8 million books, the interior also has it's own planetarium, a state-of-the-art conference centre, museums, art galleries and a restoration laboratory for manuscripts (I would have loved to have been allowed in there!!!!) It was such a special privelege to be able to wander around inside & have a look .
The architecture was very modern, with the interior set out in terraces like a coliseum and lots of light & airy space. The exterior looked like the prow of a large ship from the entrance, but when viewed from across the water it looked like an armadillo's armoured shell! What attracted me the most was that this outer surface was decorated with engravings of all the alphabets of known written forms of language. It was mindblowingly beautiful.
An obvious choice to use as my muse for this week's art project.
I know that it was only a few weeks ago that I created a language inspired WAP, but that didn't stop me choosing to use this style of design for another week's art making practice.
This week I wanted to use the library itself as the source of my series of glyphs. therefore I sat at the computer with my few photos on the big screen & drew quick line drawings of different sections of the building, both interior & exterior.
I had purposefully drawn quiuckly because I wanted the essential lines & shapes that grabbed me, I didn't want to get too caught up in the detail. With that part of the process filling two A4 pages I had plenty of scope to creat my own lettering.
Using calligraphy pens in 2 thicknesses I started trying out line combinations, repeating them over & over until I was happy with how they 'read'.
Once I had sorted out my favourites it was time to think of layout. The armoured shell of the building was constructed using different sized tiles, so I wanted to have a bit of variety somewhere in my layout, whilst keeping in mind the practicalities of an A4 size & my time limitations. I also wanted to reference the grey colour scheme with a dash of woody tones for the interior. I liked the graphic solidity of black forming the letters, so with these thoughts in mind I set about rummaging through my fabrics.
This was how it looked when I was ready to cut back. Each patch only had one other layer before the black base & some of those patches had shiny black to create a bit of difference from the matt black. I'd originally intended that each patch would have a piece of each of the fabrics mixed up in it's layers, with the hope to create an interesting relief effect as I cut back. However, I didn't have enough fabric of each of these & the time to get these few fabrics together was way too long already. I opted therefore, for the less is more approach. With so few layers there wasn't going to be a lot of cutting back, which with the clock ticking wasn't a bad thing!
Here's how it went...
Hmmmm.
Well I think I should've just stuck with the 'even less is more' approach & kept the single layer cut back! I don't think I put enough thought into tonal variation for the lower one in particular. Never mind...we live & learn!
As it happens I was having camera issues again. The outcome of one of my photography attempts has proved to be a very exciting alternative to the textile outcome! Take a look at these;
How cool does this look???? So all is not lost, this outcome is a very happy accident! I hope that you have some positive outcomes from your art learning-by-making this week!
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