Juliette Orton

  Continuing on from my previous blogs looking at how I am developing my 'Layering' sketchbook, I have now completed the Feathers section. It's funny as I thought I'd almost finished it before but I kept having more ideas - inspired by Christian Dior and my grandmother (see below!). I had another look at a photo I took of some feathers I had collected on a walk recently and extended it using a black fineliner. It's amazing how many different styles, shapes, patterns and sizes of feather there are and that's on just one type of bird!   I was having a think about how I could develop my feather investigation into a product and decided to look at Dior's use of feathers in fashion over the years, some amazing pieces, particularly hats. It was then that I remembered something about my grandmother modelling hats in the 1930s so I had a chat to my Mum and looked through some old photos. Apparently in her 20s, my grandmother worked for Res...

I've not had a chance to get on with my 'Layering' sketchbook in recent months so it has been lovely to finally have a flurry of activity and to complete a new section of it - from artichokes to feathers! In a previous blog that I wrote about starting this sketchbook (see here ) I explained how I started with a written mind map (which explored any links to 'layering' that I could think of) followed by 4 pages of those same ideas presented in a visual way. I have already explored the red onion layers so the focus of this blog is on the feather and lampshade images from the same page. I'm convinced that the lampshades were inspired by artichokes so that was my starting point. I used a black Staedtler fineliner pen to draw the artichoke using an image from the internet as a reference point. I machine stitched the card onto some green fabric to represent the colour of the artichoke and then photocopied the image, playing around with the scale and...