Weaving

The third technique I wanted to try for my paper textures was weaving.  When I initially started playing around with my papers, just to get in the right frame of mind I had made a simple woven piece with an old cereal box I was pleased with the diagonal lines that I achieved but it was quite flat, and I wanted to achieve more of a substantial texture.

Cereal Box Weave

Black Paper Strips Woven on flat paper

Brown Paper Folded and Woven with twisted tissue paper

Back of folded weave

12 stranded tissue paper braid

As you can see, with the cardboard and paper you get a much flatter texture, but once I started using tissue paper and twisting, it instantly gave the weaves depth.  They also have a much stronger consistancy, so will be great for stitching onto.

I haven’t included all of my paper manipulations on here but I now have a total of 14 so I’m going to go onto the next stage and start stitching! It will certainly be interesting and no doubt challenging trying to combat the different thickness and textures of the cards and papers, but I’m really excited to see what happens!

Vincent Floderer and Origami crumpling

Vincent Floderer is a French artist that uses origami crumpling techniques to produce fantastic pieces of art.  Initially taught the crumpling technique by British Origami Artist Paul Jackson he has taken the artform to further heights.  He is most famous for his origami mushrooms, but you can see some pictures of his various works here; http://www.le-crimp.org/spip.php?page=portefolio2&id_article=2

I wanted to get some crinkled textures for my paper manipulations and stumbled upon his technique whilst researching for my origami tessellations.  There is a video of achieving the crumpling technique on youtube which is the one that I followed. I will leave a link to it at the end of my post.  I loved creating my crumpled pieces, but looking at what can be achieved I would love to know more as the applications for transferring onto fabric would be very interesting.  Below are my attempts at crumpling, can’t wait to try and add stitch to them.

I love the lines created with this technique, and the tissue paper gains almost an elastic memory when pulled apart, so it returns to its newly made form.

Here is the link to the crumpling instruction video with Eric Gjerde. Happy Crumpling! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCVz-JkWaHg

Tessellations

As promised here are the tessellations I have created.  I love the three dimensional aspect of the texture and can’t wait to see how this can translate to fabric.

Zig Zag Tessellation 1

Zig Zag Tessellation 2

Weave Tessellation 2

Weave Tessellation 1

As I have been researching the origami tessellations I have come across a crumpling technique pioneered by Paul Jackson but there is a French artist called Vincent Floderer who has taken the technique and created amazing pieces of work.  I am going to try and create some crumpled textures for my next paper manipulations after finding some suitable papers.  I am thinking of tissue paper and maybe some stiffer papers, but I also thought about plastic bags as you get a really good crumpled texture from them, but I don’t know whether they would be able to hold their own form without assistance.

Tessellation, Crumpling & Paul Jackson

‘A tessellation of a flat surface is the tiling of a plane using one or more geometric shapes called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps’

On the list of paper manipulation techniques was a word I wasn’t familiar with, ‘Tessellation’ so I decided to do some research and came across the art of Origami tessellation.  I wanted to try and create a simple zig zag pattern so have been following some tutorials on youtube.  I’ve managed to create some great 3D geometric pieces but the simple zig zag seems to be confounding me at the moment!

I have come across a professional origami artisit called Paul Jackson http://www.origami-artist.com/ who creates amazing sculptures, but the area I found most interesting on his website was the ‘pop ups’ and some of the students work for textiles where entire garments were made from paper.  In my expolration on good old google, I also found some techniques for crumpling tissue.  When I saw ‘crumpling’ as a paper manipulation technique I just thought that it meant screwing it up in a ball. How wrong could I have been!

Well I’m going to keep trying to create my perfect zig zag and I think the crumpling techniques will be excellent for creating a surface based on one of my other drawings, so once I get some good ones I’ll post some pictures.  Here are some links to youtube videos that show the techniques I’ve talked about;

Zig zag

Crumpling

Part 2; Surface & Stitch

Laying out all of my drawings from part 1, it was interesting to see how more varied my drawings have become.  I am pleased with my body of work but feel like there are still aspects I would like to explore through further mark making.  When trying to choose six pieces that I found most inspiring to take me through to the next stage of the course I felt that my more experimental mark making pieces, created using line and experimental homemade implements, gave me the most ideas as far as texture and surface are concerned so it was quite easy to pick the ones I wanted to explore further.  I have various types of paper on hand but think I would like to get some handmade paper and tissue to experiment with for the pieces I’ve chosen.

I’ve been particularly inspired by the zig zag pattern on one of my drawings so I am going to research and explore some different paper manipulation techniques that I’m not familiar with to try and create a varied paper texture folio.