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'Marine Life' Sketchbook,


Having taken part in several Open Studio events, I have come to realise how much people do like to look at a sketchbook. I find creating the books a hugely enjoyable process and I'm still referring back to and using some of the imagery from the ones I did some 25 years ago!




In this post I thought I would give you a quick flick through my 'Marine Life' book which is a more recent creation and helped to inspire my 'Shoal' and 'Sea Garden' ranges.

Once I've chosen a theme I generally do a mind map and look at all the different areas I could explore within that theme. Over the next 5-10 pages I play around with different images, textures, media and scale to explore the possibilities. I also like to focus on a few artists or designers that inspire me too and may relate to my theme. I might do a few pages combining their style with mine and my theme and see what happens.



I recently wrote an article for 'Workshop on the Web' (Maggie Grey's online textile magazine) about a technique I use with machine stitch and papers and I first starting investigating this with the jellyfish study in my sketchbook.




With my 'Sea Garden' range, I was inspired by coral and sea anemones. I used the pale yellow thread in a 3D frame to create movement as you would get in the sea.


The 'Shoal' range was a development of a simple fish print block I made. I created one layer but then wanted to add depth so it became quite 3D (again!) with paper cutting and different papers to add interest 




There are still more pages from this sketchbook that I would like to develop further but then there is also a new sketchbook taking shape so who knows what will come next.........!






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