Saturday, 26 April 2014

Patterns, surreal elements and artist research

 
 
As part of my research into using surrealism to convey a mood/emotion I am also looking into decorative work and patterns.  This is because this will give me some ideas about different abstract shapes and combinations of shapes.  I visited Wye Vally Butterfly gardens in Symonds Yat and Cambridge Botanical Gardens, in order to observe some shapes and patterns that occur in nature. Below are some of the photos I took and some research drawings and notes.
  

Cambridge Botanical Gardens 

 







 
 
 
 

Wye Valley Butterfly Gardens  

 
 
 



 


 
 

Visual Notes


I tried to focus of the patterns on the butterfly wings and explore them in more detail. I used different colours which instantly made the patterns look less natural but you can stil tell there are elements of the patterns taken from nature. This is what is useful to my idea generation for surreal artwork.



This butterfly doesn't have much of a pattern but I thought it was interesting how its wings were clear with and black outline. This is hard to convey through drawing unless you use a detailed background.


These are pages from one of my sketchbooks. The page on the right shows some work and notes about a french illustrator I found on the networking site Instagram.  She goes by the name Lydianeka andI really like her work, but it is really hard to find information about her. Although I found her flickr accoutn where you can view some of her work https://www.flickr.com/photos/103049104@N07/11931090255/ I think her work is purely decorative and she mainly designs tattoos. Although her aims are different to mine I really like all the different aspects of her work and the busy-ness of it.  I want to incorporate some of her style into my own work in terms of the layout and her use of different shapes, animals, faces and objects all combining into a beautiful piece of artwork.  I have considered using my work with close up faces and combining it with her style of decorative art to make an overall piece that conveys an emotion.


These are some more examples of Lydianekas' work with an ink background I created. I also like her use of colour. The way they work together is fun and quirky. She usually uses pinks, blues, yellows and greens.


This is a piece I did inspired by Lydianekas' work.  I tried to convey that the girl is lonely and imagining the things around her. The busy-ness of the piece and wide range of colours are elements I got from Lydianekas' work. The girl is in grey to emphasise her loneliness and separation from everything else. 


I tried a little experiment in my patterns sketchbook. I decided to mix and match the photos of flowers with the photos of butterflies to see what I could create. I thought the plants already looked a bit like birds and the shape on one of the butterfly wings looks a bit like an eyes. So I combined the two to create acreature. This was useful to my research project to explore shapes and to come up with something surreal.



I created this from a workshop we did at University. We were given a selection of patterned paper and had to create somthing using the patterns to create different tones. I created this face as a lot of my research project has involved faces. I find it quite hard to think in terms of tone as I am so used to working using an outline. It was useful to focus more on the shadows and hilighted features instead of the outline first but I still ended up drawing an outline. 


I did another experiment similar to the one above. I tried to create an eye using different parts of the photos I'd taken. This meant I had to focus on colour, tone and the different shapes.



This is something I did as a fun combination of everything. I considered Lydianekas' work and tried to include a lot of things and think about composition.


It was useful to explore patterns in nature and consider creating surreal work. I'm not sure if patterns will make their way into my final piece yet but I still want to experiment with expressing a theme through surrealism and patterns to see if I can get the results I want.

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