12 April 2025
A Design and Colour Workshop with Vicki Worth
What a fun morning we had at this meeting. Member-led workshops are always entertaining and with often surprising outcomes! We were asked simply to bring an A4 picture of a landscape and coloured pencils (took some finding, lurking in the back of a cupboard for some of us).
We were each given two grids of squares, one on paper and one on tracing paper. We were then asked to place the tracing paper on our chosen picture (or part of the picture) and translate the colours onto our piece of plain paper. The idea was not to try to replicate the picture, but rather to consider the main colour and tones in each square. This was quite a revelation and took some of us a while to grasp!
Once we had some colours in each square, we then counted the squares for each colour and noted them down. For example, I had 14 dark green squares and 10 light green square, 9 pink squares…and so on. You get the drift? (And yes, my picture was a garden featured in the RHS magazine, hence rather a lot of green.) This gave us a rough idea of the percentage of one colour over another.
Next, we were to fill a block with stripes of our colours in proportion to each other, starting with the largest percentage and working towards the thinnest stripe. As my picture had quite a big area of silver birches, white took up a major proportion of my stripey block, followed by dark green.
The idea of the exercise was to use those blocks of colour and their proportions to design our own work, which might be blocks or stripes or ripples – anything in fact other than an approximate copy of the picture from which we’d taken our ‘inspiration’. This was such a different way of looking at a picture. To be told to ignore what constitutes the foreground or where your eye travels to, or the ‘main subject’, was remarkably liberating. We just needed to concentrate on the amount of each colour and its relationship with the other colours.
We all thoroughly enjoyed it and many members chatted through ideas, buzzing through our lunch break! Many thanks to Vicki for a fun morning.
by Nancy Shafee
Mary McIntosh talk and workshop
In the afternoon, our guest speaker Mary McIntosh gave us a most enjoyable talk about her work, which was most inspiring. She brought along packs of cotton organdie which are perfect for Pojagi, a traditional Korean patchwork technique. She used collage in her work, often print from newspapers with a perfect political balance!
On the Sunday, 11 of us met at our usual venue at Great Bookham and did a
workshop with Mary. We were given an image of the Sutton Hoo mask and worked to create an image of half the face with Markal oil sticks on black linen. When this was completed, we fixed the colour and then worked with metallic threads. Mary showed us how to put the ‘top thread’ in the bobbin!
We worked very hard all day and the results, if unfinished, were promising.
Markal sticks are no longer available but Sennelier sell oil sticks.
Below are examples of work in progress and you will be able to see some of the completed works at the next meeting.
Report by Ruth Harwood
