It continually amazes me how much longer things take to do than one imagines. Currently, I am working on a yo-yo design for my City and Guilds course. I am not a fan of yo-yos (aka Suffolk Puffs) and have had a difficult time trying to figure out what to do with them. I had been thinking of doing something stone or rock based.
Recently, I noticed the lovely barnacles on a shell in my washroom.
Then, I was searching for something completely unrelated on the Internet when I came across some images of barnacles. There they were again, my yo-yos! Well, the theme issue was solved. I went into my stash and found pale, neutralish fabrics and started making yo-yos. I made tons of them -- more than enough for any project envisioned. That took several hours. Admittedly, making the yo-yos was fairly mindless work that could be and was partly done while spending time in other activities. However, it still took several hours.
Choosing the background fabric took another 30 minutes at least. Then, I started to arrange all the yo-yos on my background. Well, that took almost 2 hours. Yikes! I arranged and rearranged, then left it for a while, then revisited and revised several times. I find the use of a reducing glass to be very helpful in this process. I can look at the piece through the reducing glass, giving me perspective, yet I am still close enough to rearrange without constantly moving back and forth to examine the piece.
I am also in the never-ending process of organizing my studio. At one of the times away from the project, whi
le clearing up, I came across some cheesecloth I had painted at an earlier time. As I was putting it away, it crossed my mind that it might be just what I needed for my barnacle piece. The colour is not right, but I do like the effect. This just goes to show that clearing the studio is a good thing.
This is sort of what the piece looks like right now. The colours in the photos are quite different than the actual piece. The blues in the photo are duller than in real life and the yo-yos are distinctly pinker. Also, the green cheese cloth will be replaced with a blue green cheese cloth. This however gives me a good idea of a what this will look like when finished.
