Staffordshire Hoard

Enlarged View of above

More samples.  I quilted a small piece of calico and then painted it with Gesso.  After that I painted it with various colours of Acrylic paint including:

Rich Transparent Red Oxide
Quinacridone/ Nickel Azo Gold
Dioxazine Purple
Metallic Bronze
Metallic Gold

There might also have been some Payne's Grey and/or Indanthrene Blue, oh and there was some red too.  I really should make notes when I am messing about.

Thinking about adding some painted Bondaweb now.  I want it to look like it has been dug out of the earth.

Now we have colour

The electrician was here all day on Friday so I was confined to working in the kitchen to keep out of the way.  I managed to colour in some of my sketchbook page and made a stencil (bottom right hand corner) which appears to work quite well.  Some of the patterns remind me very much of Art Deco not Anglo Saxon!

Staffordshire Hoard

This is the other thing I have been doing.  The patterns are my attempt at working out some of the designs found on items amongst the Staffordshire Hoard.  I am sure that you can see accuracy is not my strong point, although I did draw some grid lines.

I thought I might be able to create a background fabric using lots of bits of the patterns and then work on top of that.  I am making very slow progress, particularly as I will probably have to make some print blocks or stencils.  Unfortunately, once work starts on the house again all my playtime will have to cease!

Staffordshire Hoard

I have been doodling again.  I have been drawing one of the animals from a cheek piece fragment from the Staffordshire Hoard.  It is a good job you cannot see the original!  I had to create a grid as I managed to get the proportions a bit wrong.

I traced the image from my drawing and scanned it into photoshop and I have since been playing around with it - single image, multiple images, flipped image ... etc etc.

 

One of the problems I am forever having when using Photoshop is remembering how to do things.  I wanted a transparent background so that I could overlap the two images shown above. I then erased part of one of them so they looked like they were intertwined.  Better think about using some colour and distressing techniques next so they look old and worn. 

More design options

Staffordshire Hoard

The Region are running a competition based on the Staffordshire Hoard so I decided I might like to have a go at creating something.  I have been looking at the booklet I have got for some inspiration and found this garnet set sword pyramid.  As you can see I have been extracting the basic pattern design and playing with it in my sketchbook.  I actually cut holes in the page and placed a piece of coloured paper underneath it to see what it looks like.  Of course it should really be red, but I could not find any red paper at the time.

It all looks a bit Aztec to me so I am not sure I am very happy with it.  Back to the drawing board ....