Elizabeth Barton Masterclass

At last, a class where you don't race to finish something off, no matter how unsatisfactory! In fact the emphasis in Elizabeth Barton's 2 way workshop at FoQwas on making lots of potential designs and leaving them to mellow for a while- how refreshing. I loved her quote about people spending 3 minutes using their first idea, 3 months making it and then as it doesn't work, put beads on it! So true - in my case paint rather than beads!
After spending some time talking about design principles we started a series of exercises using the images we'd collected (which for me in itself had been very useful )
I decided to work with some crumbly doors - I love this one from Yazd in Iran with the shadows of the tree. We placed tracing paper over our photos and traced just the major lines - already simplifying and introducing hand work rather than a mechanical image.

Then from photocopies (thanks Hilary!) we used cropping tools to choose small sections of interest and then cut these out and mounted them on another piece of paper

I liked this one from the diagonal - the combination of straight and organic line. We did lots of cutting out and re-arranging ( glad I bought scissors and pritt stick) not thinking about it too much -" make visual decisions visually"

After homework thinking about our influences and preferences " I am a quilter who..."(helped by a glass or 2 of wine and assistance from Sue ) we came back the next day to critique our work ( more about that in another post) and work up value studies . Colour was discussed too - guess who couldn't resist getting her paints out even if we supposed to be getting on with shading in greys - bad Mags!