...Fashion .. its loud and tasteless and I've heard it before (or not) (D Bowie 1980)

Action packed week at college non stop info overload - lots of new words learned, Hetero-normative - not a word that crops up in everyday conversation.... but it popped up a lot this week as we considered fashion and clothes choices, design trends and historical bias for men and womens general attire... Do we wear clothes for modesty or warmth or really to make a statement! Why are mens outfits so often stereotyped - boring - formal - plain - all similar styled? Why do we notice when men wear florals, pink, flamboyant colourful outfits, flowing shirts, skirts etc.... and what messages does these clothes send?

It was an interesting informative thought provoking lecture and I feel an essay coming on .... I've got to write something for the module - I was going to do boring ethics and sustainability but this sounds more engaging and I'm feeling a wee bit low of sustainability at the moment having just purchased lots of synthetic material - but I will be making works of art which will last for ever and never go to landfill!!

Next up was masses of useful technical stuff about being self employed - agents, costings, paperwork, all good stuff and then a lovely messy ( I just love the way messy in the dictionary equate with slovenly - there no slovenliness in my dying - loads of mess ha hah) afternoon dying fabric and playing with the state of the art heat press making lots of almost slovenly heat transfer prints - I just love the way on paper the ink has no life - it looks flat and then you transfer it to fabric and it positively glows and the colours shout out!!

cleaning screen

And then onto the practical hand on really MESSY stuff - I have set up from scratch my first ever self exposed screen.. Incidentally, that's not me exposing myself just the term for a prepping a screen. Its an A1 size screen print sampling a selection of my drawings, some hand rendered and some digitally manipulated with a view to practicing screen print and goodness knows I need the practice... and using a cross selection of drawings to try layering and overlapping.

paper pull through

It was a big screen and being new to the process, it took some doing, I think that's why I'm not so keen on screen printing - there is so much washing scrubbing cleaning and more scrubbing and after a while it can feel a bit tedious - not so bad if you do a run of prints but quite a lot of faff for one off little prints. Granted its easier when there aren't so many people queuing for washing drying etc..

pink and orange photo doesn't do it justice! Its much more fun!

Totally relieved that somehow I had got the process right and what had emerged was a screen with my actual drawings on it, I had time to run a quick pull through on paper to check the prints really worked. I also did a quick copy on a piece of bright pink fabric I found going spare in the print room, most people were using black to proof the screen but in the true sense of sticking to a random colour palate I used a mix off orange with a spot of red to deepen the tone pigment paint. I really like pink and orange together.

There's a lot of glorious mess and slovenliness to be had when mixing paints and lots of pretty patterns which are just accidental - I just cant help recording them...

smears and mess

Scotland part 2

The second half of the week continued in much the same vein. We had one rainy afternoon which was actually quite nice to be holed up in the house with the rain lashing the windows. It probably wasn't quite so nice for the two visitors that came on their bikes but they're tough cookies - and its only water- but I did feel sorry for them having to cycle six miles back down the track in the wind and rain, but given Scotland, it wasn't as bad as it could be. The big quest for the 2nd half of the week was to find some deer antiers! The chap that owned the house dropped in to visit - he was a very friendly fella and was chatting about how this was the time of year when all the Stags lost their antlers (he collected them and sold them) so after that we were on the serious lookout. It's always been Fred's mission to find some dropped antlers.... The Monro baggers continued with the mission to bag the remaining three Monros... there is discussion as whet...

Vigo

We left the ship to explore Vigo. Its a much larger place then we expected... although tbh I hadn't given ut a lot of thought. Its a real mish mash of old and new and having got a map from tourist info we decided to follow the walking trail to the Monte Castro... the highest point of the town. Most of the town was pretty much as everywhere else... lots of traffic... lots of people... one or two interesting buildings and a lot of shopping. We headed to the art gallery - this has been a year of gallery visits so we we seen o reason to change now. The Museo de Marco is housed in the towns ex prison building and its very grand. In fact, I think that on this occaision the building might have been more interesting than the art.... Although the visiting exhibition by Susanne S D Themlitz was strangely compelling. It was a huge varied collection of eclectic items... found, salavaged, manipulated and arranged in lots of ways - weirdly inspiring - and mostly enjoyable to look at...

Funchal

So after three days at sea we finally hit Funchal in Madeira. An escape from the ship, and I have to say it was very pleasant indeed. First of all the weather is really splendid. Especially when you know that everybody else in the UK is suffering grim storms and vile winds.. Over here it is between 22 and 25 degrees is really quite warm. Funchal is a pretty city. It's built on a hill it with lots of lovely white houses with stunning red roofs. In order to get the best of it we walked along the sea front until we got to the cable car and we took it up the hill. It was a really good ride much longer than we imagined and it's quite weird because it goes right through the town - completely over everybody's house... So not only do you get a lovely vista of the bay but you can view the beautiful rooftops and get to look in everybody's gardens and to look at their picnic sets.. clean washing nice plants... scratty b...

Planet Ruby Starrs

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