Ellen Jewett, Mr Finch and Anna-Will Highfield

I have choose to look at both of these artists together because they both create multi-disiplinary art pieces. Ellen Jewett creates these almost mythical medium scale sculptures that are made up of polymer clay, acrylic paint, metal, cold poclain and oil. Where as Mr Finch creates fabric and wire sculptures of mostly animals such as butterflies.
The similarities they have are that they both use wire and their main subject is animals. Mr Finch's main body for the piece is the fabric and exposed wire, Ellen Jewett doesnt tend to have the wire exposed.
Another artist that creates animal sculptures is Anna-Will Highfield, her sculptures are made from paper and some are at the same scale as the real animal. Her pieces are similar to mine because of the subject and the fact that they are 3D. I really like these pieces as they have a rough finish to them , from just looking at them at first you wouldn't guess that they are made of paper.

Evaluation of development

When doing the experiment cor my exquisite corpse project, i tried to make sure that i covered all of the areas.

Here i decided to try and make parts of ivy and brambles from fabric and wire.
I really like how it has turned out, this i could use to wrap around my sculptures body and then drap it onto the floor.

The next thing i have decided to do was create some roots/branches to show the main body of the sculpture i have tried creating this through using air dry clay, painted wire hot textiles and fabric.
My favourite ones out of all of them is the air dry clay and the fabric, to me they are the ones that look most like the original source.
The next thing i could try is combining some of the ones i have used seperately to see if i can make something more unique.

Oil Painting

For this workshop we were told that we were going to be making a oil painting on either a board or a canvas.

The first thing i did was to prime my board, I had chosen Brown because the main colour in my animal was brown.

Once I had done that I drew the initial outline of the animal, i had decided on creating a hybrid bird that was mostly bird like but had goat like legs.

The next thing to do was to pain the main body shape in the first colour, when I was mixing my colours they ended up being wrong, and when green but it didn't matter because i could go over it later when I added the next coat.  

I decided that I wanted to work on a piece of board because I haven't painted on one before.

In the image above it shows the first layer of my painting, just under the beak I also added some white now so that when I wanted to blend it later it would be easier.

The next step was to add some of the shading and the main bodies correct colour, once that was correct I was able to add the details, this i had done with a dry brush and a shade darker than the main body and gradually went down the body getting bigger and more faded as I went down.

Once I was happy with the details, I just needed to do a bit more blending and shading this mostly took place at the head of the animal. I made it so the feathered pattern only started after the eye and that the eye was standing out more than it previously did.

Disciplines

Some of the disciplines I could look into is textiles with 3D and textiles and photography.

For textiles I could look into: Felt, Hot textiles, dissolvable fabric, appliqué, machine stitch and hand stitch.

For 3D I could look into: wire, clay, paper mache, plaster, mod roc, casting

Mr Finch

Polly Verity

'The Sharp-Beaked Hound of Zeus' 2009

Creates wire and paper sculptures, this is one of the techniques I am going to experiment with. 
                                             

Shibori

Synthetic fabrics or man-made fabrics are very different in structure to natural fabrics. They absorb dye differently and usually have a different surface quality, have more 'spring' to the touch.

Synthetic fabrics include polyesters, viscose, lycra, acetate, microfibres and rayon.

These fabrics can be used in a versatile medium for textile artists. Fabric can be wrapped around objects and set with heat to distort and manipulate the characteristics of the cloth.





The art of wrapping and tying fabric derives from the japenese technique called Shibori. This method has been used for centuries to create intricate patterns. With the introduction of synthetic fabrics Shibori can be used for sculpting fabrics using heat.