Project 7: Visual Experimentation. Exercise 1: Using Black and White

This is a very interesting exercise to begin Project 7. The first part was to draw a line drawing of one of a selection of subjects. I chose the sea. There was a suggestion to brainstorm ideas, but I’ve drawn, embroidered, collaged, printed etc the sea dozens of times as it’s a major part of my artwork, so I just drew. Just before this I read a poem which included the words “the long haired sea” (The Last Verses of Beccan in R Simpson, “Celtic Daily Light”, (Kevin Mathew Ltd, Stowmarket, 2003, pg 24 June). This inspired me to create passages of jagged lines under the froth of the waves, to give the sense of movement and wildness of “the long haired sea”. 

Next we had to invert the image so that the line drawing was white on black.

I then printed the two images so that I had the original, a spare print of it and the inverted version.

The next part of the exercise was to cut out parts of the inverted version and stick them onto the original. This was quite fiddly, even with my little pointy scissors, due to all my ‘hairy’ zigzags and loops. It was quite satisfying though. At this point I stopped and looked at what I’d done so far and what I might add.

I noticed that, where the zigzag bits were not fully stuck down, they were creating some interesting shadows. This detail shows some of these shadows, though they were more pronounced than this shows.

We could now overlay pieces of white over the black, add more black bits, and so on. Having observed the shadows above, I decided to cut out and apply more of the inverted image in order to further enhance the frothy parts of the waves in contrast to the mainly black sea . I chose not to stick these down, but to lay them onto the collage in order that the shadows created by them not lying flat would become a part of the final photographed image. This added movement to the final image.

I am excited by the approach set out in this exercise. The ability to turn a line drawing into a collage of black and white papers is one I’ve not come across before, and it has enabled me to create a picture of the sea that is unlike my other seascapes. I would like to experiment more with this technique when time allows, to see how it might work with different colours and subjects.