A Piece of My Mind: Cloth no2 'The Waves'

The Reference

Luisa decided since we were going to be laying the Waves cloth on the floor and putting the Tree cloth onto the frame, that Karen should manage the Waves cloth - a job she took very seriously! :)
We were all a little our of our comfort zones.
We'd done a cloth together, made some discoveries, so we were one step ahead of the game.
What challenges would this cloth bring up?

Hee haaw - the cloths have arrived!

Same as last time - out with the measuring tapes and pythagoras.
We all had more of a clue what we were doing now so it inevitably went a little quicker ;)

shiny happy people

rarrgh nail that sucker down

And here's where we made our first mistake that became a most valuble lesson.

After gridding up the reference and and the cloth, I started on the right side and Sarah on the left and we drew in the top outline of the waves.

When we met together in the middle, Gary who was on the paintbridge noticed the design was repeated at the middle.

It didn't make sense?!? how could we get it wrong? I counted the boxes from left to right and its then I discovered, there were 2 extra boxes on the cloth than the reference!

It turns out the reference was a little shorter in scale to the cloth. However, if we had worked from the middle out, we would have got the design correct only to discover we had to make up the extra squares on the side. Which would have been easier to do that rubbing out and starting again.

Lesson learnt - always work from the middle out and number/letter your grid lines.

well anyways it was easily fixed and remarked properly.

And we got some paint onto the canvas!!

As we were outlining the wave top with our brush-on-a-stick.. Gary suggested trying to put the paint on with a texture roller - basically a roller that's had bits yanked out of it.

You can make all different types of pattern depending on the texture you want. for our purposes, we had a spotty one (most of the sponge pulled out to create dots) or a holey (round dots pulled out)

So we tried a bit of that.

All these ideas were totally new to me - I would have never thought up the idea of using a sponge with texture on a roller; it just takes one idea to have everyone movin off on a different direction.

It's important to note at this stage that the second cloth was now stretched onto the wall in front of the bridge, We were now working on 2 cloths in the paint shop. First time ever for us and the new building!!


great view up here!

And the bridge provided an opportunity to see our work from a little distance.

We used this time to have a good look at the reference and discover areas of light on the design - planning to paint less in that area. Our color seemed to be a little greener than the reference. More noticeable when taking a step back. Most people outside the paintshop may say 'its blue-there is no green!'.

Its the subtlest shade of green and we could see it.

Karen decided to give it a splatter of Ultramarine all over and it brought the color closer to the reference.

Colormixing is another thing I wanted to get some knowledge in. I've been watching Luisa and Karen mix paints and just listen to what they work out when they have problems matching the colours. There is a bit of a science to it and its like everything else

-it's practise-

Gridded up again - both reference and cloth- to chalk in the waves..

the..

team

waves

getting a little more confortable with the stick thing!! marking out the waves is helping a lot.

It's actually quite relaxing now.

I wonder if I look like those people in that book now?

always the perfectionist!

It feels amazing after all that hard work marking out to get the paint onto it!! It's like euphoric almost!

I love these waves :D

Am even loving the brush-on-a-stick!!


Karen has such a nice touch


weee! swish swish


wow look at us go!

We regularly checked up on the bridge to make sure we had the patterns similar to the patterns on the design.

It was really difficult at times to follow those lines on the design - the grid helped a lot- but it was a challenge!

Whilst we painted on the white lines we also had to consider that the designer had made these lines using a print. Thinks like curving the corners where the lines disected and changing the thickness of the line a times all helped to stay true to the design.


with print texture

After giving the lines a further bit of loving and making them crisp, we added our print texture in accordance with the reference.

And wow - look at what we did! :D


left


right


Full

There are loads of things I took from the waves cloth experience.

How important it is to be free to new ideas and willing to try things out.

To get the mark up drawing of the design as accurate as possible, saves you loads of time later. At the same time not to get too caught up on the accuracy of every tiny little line.

It;s theatre - you can't see it all the way back in the stalls!

As Luisa was busy on the Tree cloth and Karen was manager on the Waves, I didn't work much with her, but she watched what was happening, thought ahead and moved people onto our cloth to help at times when we needed it. There was a sense of organisation within the team and I beleive it was Luisa that helped create it. She's relied upon by all the team members. Was just thinking the other day how I noticed so many times someone shouting on her.