LOOKING UP (Weekly Art Project 2020 #3)

This week's art project has been one of fits & starts. We had a public holiday on Monday, so my routine was thrown out by that & a few days of heat & humidity have contributed to the haphazard means of sticking with the plan. If I'd been a few more weeks into this renewed discipline, I'd have given myself the week off, but I REALLY wanted to get another piece completed!

So I did!

This week my inspiration came from the patterned ceilings of cave shrines along the banks of the Nile River. Our excursion took us to where limestone blocks were quarried for the building of Temples. We reached the site by boat & had to clamber over large boulders  to get there.  I remember it being a very hot day & how blissfully cool it was inside the cave.  Looking up we were surprised to see colour  when all around us was natural stone.

 Three specific patterns were still visible on the roughly hewn ceilings, each in the same colour palette of red, gold and white, with the addition of green in this pattern above.

I was contemplating how I could compose these patterns in an effective way within an A4 sized space & I was not coming up with any bright ideas!  Sometimes the creative juices just don't flow, so I went back to the source...my photos of that specific excursion.

That was when I came upon this photo.  High up on the rock face outside the shrines was this charming engraved boat.
Now I wanted to have this as my art inspiration!
Hmmmm...perhaps I could do something really crazy and try & incorporate them all!

It was time to do some drawing.
When it came to drawing the boat I also included lines to indicate shading.
I liked the graphic look they produced & began to think about how I might then move that forward into the design process.

This year I am trying to use more of my tools more often, so put that intention into motion by painting some fabric in two of the ceiling patterns.

I then layered them up with a black fabric drawn up with the boat design on top.
I stitched along the lines and then started to cut back.
Completed, I liked the little frayed edge of green below the horizon line, so decided to keep it.
Already I was having second thoughts about those bold patterns together! They are very loud!

The next part of the process was to layer another piece of black fabric on top of the whole design.  This one was marked with the shading lines & I had to be very careful to line it up accurately with the design edges below! It was then time to start cutting back.

This was how it looked  after all those skinny lines were exposed.
Whilst I was very happy with the black shape & lines, I felt there needed to be a stronger difference between back & foreground.

So I painted the white diamonds red, which was a tad fiddley, but worth the effort.

I'm very pleased with the end result, especially given that this was achieved in small batches of time over 5 days.  I dont find it easy to maintain any sense of flow working like that & in hindsight, if my brain had been functioning better, this  composition might have been more effective if the design of the background pattern had been a smaller scale to the foreground.

Nevertheless it was fun, reminds me of that trip and is bold and effective.

  I couldn't help trying it out in my layout app!  This was the result!