Enter Duck

As an artist, I was once very constrained and I would rarely explore, truly explore within my own practice. I feel this was a byproduct of studying art and constantly feeling like I needed to meet the ‘criteria’. My focus would be the final piece which would be graded or assessed, rather than the journey of getting to it. Over the years, since graduating, my art practice became somewhat random. Once free from the vague mysteries of trying to conform to a grading matrix, I would bounce between different media and loved to learn new approaches. I never knew how to control where my interests went or how to produce something with a consistent ‘style’. I thought creating a ‘style’ was mandatory for all artists, but didn’t understand how anyone did it or how anyone could stick with the same media without getting bored. It’s a wonder I didn’t realise I was neurodiverse sooner!

Enter my MA in Arts Practice (Arts, Health and Wellbeing) where the focus wasn’t a specific finished piece of art, but rather a project where you could decide its outcome. It was through this period of academia and the influence of my wonderful cohort, where I finally - after a decade of thinking about them - bought a sewing machine. It was a game changer. I finally found that I didn’t need a ‘style’, my consistent element is that all of the skills and methods of working I’d gathered over the years, could in some way, translate into textiles. I genuinely felt like this whole time I'd been a textile artist, without fabric or a sewing machine.

Enter Duck. With my fabric pieces from last week, I wasn’t thrilled with how some of the rubbings came out. The pastels hadn’t quite behaved as expected and I hadn’t really come into it with a plan beyond ‘go outside, be in nature, get some rubbings on fabrics’. So sitting at my desk, I began to think, what do I want to make? I thought back to my walk last week and one thing I hadn’t captured, beyond some photos, were the ducks and birds. 

Duck number one!

 

Enter a textile fabric pen and grabbing the pastel dye sticks. I just drew. I am not sure if the seam allowances will like that I drew so close to the edge of the fabric, but I am debating making it into a little patchwork. The wonders of textiles. You can figure out a way to amend most things with fabric. I added a bit of colour back in with the pastel dye sticks, found the fabric pen can smudge if you’re not too careful, so lesson learned. Maybe heat-set the pen before adding colour.

 

I even found my GCSE piece!! This was from a long time ago.

Now, past Aimee, if she had been making a duck illustration, would have probably planned it a lot, the composition, what the background should be. In fact sitting here, I remember I did actually do a project about ducks once for my GCSE, I recall painting with watercolours an Ugly Duckling book cover. Back then watercolours were the main media I would use and I didn’t branch out very much. Well, present Aimee, decided to just draw ducks, using the photos as a reference, and hope for the best (mostly forgetting and only remembering part way into the second piece to take a progress shot).

Look at me, remembering to take a progress shot!

For my next duck, I decided to work in an opposite manner. The textile fabric pen needs to dry for 2 hours before you can heat-set it. But the pastels you can heat-set straight away. So I worked in colour first, adding in shapes and rough markings. Heat-set it and then drew over the top. Unlike past me, I didn’t worry if where the duck needed to be drawn didn’t sync up with the colour perfectly, anything over the lines kind of blended in with the background. Plus there's a certain charm with things like misaligned lino prints, that I’ve always liked.

 

Completed duck number two!

I always love how much context the outlines give when working in this way, with the colours first. These are both now dry and fully cured with my iron! My next tasks for this project is to pick some complimentary fabrics, work out if I am indeed patchworking one of the ducks and make some useful fun pouches to be used!