MORE BOTANICS (WAP #17; inspired by travels in Egypt)

Last week my venture through the travel photos brought me to the impressive Temple of Karnak in Egypt where I was particularly enamoured with the wall of carved drawings showing botanic flora & fauna.  These illustrations date back to 1425BC and were at the behest of Thutmosis3, who had discovered the plants & wildlife of Syria so fascinating ....as his troops were killing off the locals!

Such was the range of interesting plant shape that I felt one weekly art project was not enough, so I returned to this source of inspiration again this week & began by doing even more drawings.

After a couple of hours taking visual notes, I recognised that 4 sheets of A4 should provide me with enough data to create a composition!

That though, was the hard part.  I wanted to cram as much in as possible, but I also wanted a combination of plants that would look aestheticly pleasing.  I've been looking at a lot of Still Life paintings lately & that composing of elements is so important; various heights, shapes & a sense of flow with a quirky spot of interest here & there...all adds up to a formula that works

After much erasing & rearranging I finally had a combination of lines I was pleased with.  Wanting to keep colour minimal, I made my decisions, ironed' layered up & stitched the design in.

Then it was time to get the magic happening & let the cutting back begin.  Here's how it changed over the ensuing hour.

                                                   

This is my end result & I am very pleased with it.  The style is so different from my usual work which of course, keeps me interested & engaged in what I'm doing. 

I've loved every minute of this focused period of time in this part of the Karnak Temple.  Next time I will look elsewhere in this temple complex for inspiration though.  I hope your own creative adventures are exciting you too.

BOTANIC SAMPLER (WAP #16 Inspired by travels in Egypt)

Just down the road from Luxor is the magnificent Temple of Karnak.  Not only was this where we encountered a multitude of fellow travellers, but this temple complex was seriously overwhelming in both size & beauty.
It may seem ridiculous, but we were struggling to grasp that this was real....that these incredible buildings with their exquisite decorative features were so very very ancient, yet here we were in the 21st century walking around them! This wasn't a dream, or a book...it was sun, sand & stone! Real!

One of the parts of this complex that I most wanted to visit was the Botanic Garden of Thutmose 111.  This was a series of walls, which I imagine once surrounded a courtyard, at the back of the Festival Temple.  Here Thutmose had asked artisans to carve relief drawings of the many exotic plants & wildlife he brought back from his military campaigns in Syria.  It seems that old Tut was a bit of a Botanist, as he liked collecting specimens from all over Egypt as well.

When we finally found the right spot, the sun was very bright & it was hard to actually see the reliefs, and photographing them was also difficult...I literally couldn't see where I was pointing the camera! (I have a photos where heads are missing from birds etc!!!!)
With the few photos I have, I chose to make this collection my muse for this week's art project.

 First I needed to discover what I could from the photos with line drawings.  It didn't take long before I knew that I had more than enough to create a composition that might fit into an A4 size, so I started working up a design , erasing...and working up again!!!

Last week I had popped into Spotlight fabric store & couldn't resist this bundle of greens.  I decided to use them as part of my colour palette for this exercise.

Once the fabrics were chosen & the design was transferred to the top fabric, I chose a variegated neutral coloured thread to stitch in the design.  Then it was time to let the cutting back begin.  Here's how it went;

 Whilst I was pleased with the effect of the cutting back, it needed a bit more tweeking...

 ...so I added some handstitch. 
Hmmm, I still felt it needed more, perhaps more texture...more something.  How about more stitching into the background without cutting away?

 This is my end result & I'm happy with it.  I still feel that as an artwork, it is not finished, but as this is an exercise....it has been a valueable experiment.  I'd tried a similar variation of the reverse applique technique a few weeks ago using just one multicoloured fabric as the middle layer, so I really wanted to try using plain coloured fabrics, but a few of them! I really like the shapes of the plants & the simplicity of using blocks of colour like this, but to make it more interesting, I think adding the additional stitching helped.

I was very engrossed in this work & am so inspired by the Botanic reliefs, that I think I'll return to them again next week for more experimenting. Until then...happy creating!

DUCK FRIEZE (WAP #15 Inspired By Egypt)

The inspiration for this week's art project is a huge linear frieze on the exterior of Abyddos temple in Egypt showing a mass of flapping ducks.

Close examination of the photo shows the zigzags indicating the stylized effect of water and a perimeter framed by lotus plants.  Looking even closer there are solid lines that may indicate that the ducks are trapped.  That's probably why the scene is so noisy with wings!

I also noticed that the ducks seemed to fall into 3 specific designs, each being used in both directions.  This led me to wonder whether stencils were used to create this scene of avian agitation!

What was I going to do with this? 

Having no real sense of direction, I started by drawing the 3 bird shapes I'd seen on the frieze & then ...embracing my inner Matisse... I cut these out to use  as stencils.

Finding a piece of scrap paper larger than an A4, but smaller than an A3, I started to randomly place  my ducks & stenciled around them, over lapping some to eventually build up a mess of duck-like lines.

Using whatever I had to hand, I framed A4 size sections, which I then photographed with my phone.  I wanted my 'design' to have some of each of the stencils as well as enough negative space to allow the background to show through.  I knew that there was some zigzag fabric in my stash somewhere that would be perfect for the background of this piece.

I took 7 different A4 shots & eventually settled on 1 to develop further.

At this stage I really wasn't sure what 'develop' would mean!  Was I going to stitch & cut out the ducks? Were they going to be different colours?  Was I going to do something quite different again????

I opted for something quite different... for me. 
I wanted to create an almost abstract response to the Duck Frieze highlighting the shapes of the negative space (background) & merging the shapes of the birds.  With this in mind I kept my colour choices minimal.

 It was a feat of concentration to sew the outline stitches in!

This is how it looked when I cut away to the background.

This is the end result.
I achieved this by adding more sewn lines completing the shapes of the overlapping ducks & cutting away those bits.  The result is an intriguing mix of lines & forms full of movement.  Every now & then my eye does spot a duck.... before it flies off to more of those irregular shapes.

This is a very different style of work for me & I enjoyed every minute. It retains the energy of the original frieze without the sense of being trapped.