Planet Ruby Starrs

Just a quick reminder that not all art students hang out everyday in the studio doing lush things with fabric and design - occasionally there's a bit of hard graft involving contextual theory, writing essays and reading books with long words in them!!

Its all hands on deck full steam computers ahead and final designs are starting to emerge.... they are a little bit scary!!! Having spent a week or more colouring in digital images  - trying to establish a colour palatte that matches my original mood board I've come up with 15 shades based on 5 colours and while I personally think my mood board was almost sophisticated my designs are coming out completely bonkers!!! This is not entirely unintentional, my concept was to use traditional quaint porcelain posh ornaments as seen in the Bowes Museum collection and transform them into funky, naive, contemporary designs and that's pretty much what I have done! The colour palate however has got very vibrant - very primary - gaudy to say the least - but I got to the point when I thought if I want bonkers designs and gloriousness then there are no half measures. Its a slamitin Ruby style again!! I've done some market research and find that my work could well sit (colourw...

Dr Fred and I held one of our star weekends this last weekend.  Interestingly this was at a venue very near the 'Lost amongst the Stars' weekend we went to the week before but it was quite a different affair- no less enjoyable and equally great fun but definitely a different atmosphere and disappointingly not quite so much clear skies!!! I didn't take any photos so here are are a few memorable slides from Dr Freds presentation... make what you will... What makes it different is not so much the people and location, these weekends are largely based on listening to lectures from Dr Fred, so its much more educationally biased, but of course the participants only pretend to come for the knowledge sharing when really they know they are going to get fantastic grub!!! We hired the Langdon Beck Youth hostel located just the other side of Middleton in Teesdale and very pleasant it was. Its a spacious building with plenty of bedrooms and a most fantastic view down the dale.  ...

I bit the bullet this week so to speak and braved the ordeal of cleaning and producing two new screens for new print designs... It wasn't as hard as I had expected, but of course it was while my screens were in the exposure unit that the bulb blew rendering the unit unusable!!! Last week the steamer broke while my fabrics were being steamed and this week the exposure thingy!!!!! My mum always said I had too much electricity in me and everything broke - I think she actually mean't I was just plain clumsy but hey ho, whatever, she weren't too wrong!!!! The screens were finally finished but I haven't had a minute to go look at em let alone test them - that's the first job for next week.  As an antidote to the total frustration of screen printing I was able to employ some time making multi-directional patterns.  Good old fashioned cutting. sticking and colouring! Never happier, sat in the studio cutting up various drawing resized - flipped - photocopied to start so...

Time marches on and I don't know how another week sped by... it was another a completely mad one which included an almost total melt down in the car park as I thought I had lost my sketch book!!! If anyone has ever lost all the computer work or a portfolio or sketch book they will know exactly how I felt!! BUT.. thankfully I eventually found it stashed away hidden under some evil bad hiding stuff!!! I started breathing again and with crisis averted, the rest of the week was spent sorting it out and getting ready for my first mid term tutorial which was great and made me feel like I am heading in the right direction... So despite a nasty sore throat and grim head all was well in the end.... and I finally feel I am getting used to this practically full time college lark.. we still have hardly any food in the house and clean clothes kind of emerge from time to time - but I'm starting to get a bit more organised (ha ha ) cant quite remember how the hoover works!!! And then a we...

Finally a fairly catastrophe free week... a week full of screen printing at college learning discharge techniques - all of which produce interesting effects - take up loads of time and energy and don't particularly appeal to me!  I think it about practicing and finding the right colours and images, I have dyed a lot of fabric this week and I quite enjoy the process but I cant get the colours right - I cant get the depth of colour I want in the cotton fabrics and I'm loathe to use expensive silks until I either know what I'm doing or can get colours right!!! drying dyeing - but more colour but still not deep!!! I've had a further play with heat transfer printing and continue to be amazed at the colour transformation from paper to material.  Using an A1 sheet of paper I mish mashed a load of greens and blues and threw in a bit of bleach to lighten some of the tones - I swirled it about using a big brush and then dried it off with a hair drier - the ended result looke...

Thanks for the help with making the blog work - its still a pain asit shouldnt need the fuss is it needs - i'm stillworking on it - but for the timebeing thanks to Maggie... the following works.. left click on the top of the left hand side of the blog and when the menu drops choose 'sidebar' and this enables you to add comments and also stops the  page from moving and rolling around.   new post about this weeksantics to follow later