Hilary Beattie course at Art Van Go

Just before Easter I spent a couple of highly enjoyable days at Art Van Go on a course all about creating art from Gelli to Canvas with Hilary Beattie.  I went with my mother-in-law and good friend Paula Watkins, more of whom you will be hearing about as we start to talk about the book we are writing with Maggie Grey coming out soon!

I have used the Gelli plate before and love it, but this was a completely new approach for me.  The way we printed with leaves and anything with texture was really interesting to learn about and I felt that I got a huge amount from it.

Hilary is full of life and it made for a really fun time.  She had a huge collection of dye pots and we spent a lot of time dyeing papers and pages from our sketchbooks.  I think the promise of all those pots of dyes made us all a bit demob-happy and we were frantically trying to find surfaces to dye (mainly my hands as it turned out).

I came away with a huge amount of beautifully coloured and decorated pages.  It has given me real food for thought about how to take my Gelli plate printing further.  I won't give all the processes away, as they are all in Hilary's book Make It Personal: Book 1 Preparing Your Palette, but we used modelling paste to create textured surfaces on our canvas, and the dyes to colour our printed papers.  The collage aspect of the printed papers onto the canvas is something I didn't get to finish, and I think it needs a bit more thought and work before I'm happy with it, but using some different materials and trying out the Neocolour 1 crayons was great as I wouldn't have thought of using them before.

Also, being at Art Van Go, there were plenty of shopping opportunities, and I picked up some dyes, which I have always been too scared to attempt.  But having used them for painting papers, and having an idea of how to now paint fabric, I am starting with a few colours and see how I go.  I have bought some screw cap tubs to put the dyes in

A selection of surfaces that the class created prior to adding colour

This work was by Christine Parsons and turned out brilliantly (see later picture)

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These are pieces of work by everyone in the group. Hilary is putting some photos on her blog, which may have names on, but I can't remember whose is whose.

My canvas before anything was collaged onto it.

This is wonderful.  It's by Jill Packer.

Christine Parson's wonderful finished piece

Another fab piece by Christine Parsons

I don't know who did this!

I think this was Karen's

Don't know who did this one either, but I love it.

Sorry, I don't have a name for this one either.

I love the colours in this one

 I would highly recommend a course with Hilary.  She has a wonderfully free attitude to her sketchbooks and doesn't treat them like precious objects to be revered.  She experiments, paints bits on them, uses up paint from her brush before washing and is incredibly relaxed about how they look.  Looking through them, there are some wonderful pages with fantastic mixed-media work so it obviously works well for her.  And I think it is a good way to free yourself up and not set yourself unrealistic goals of producing fantastic pages.

Gelli Plates

I was sorting through the work I produced doing demos at the Crafts4Crafters Show in Exeter back in January.  Some of the best ones went into the Product Review section in the March issue of Workshop on the Web, but there were a few more that didn't make it.

This Gelli Plate print was made using a homemade stamp (more about that later) and acrylic paint onto black cotton sateen.  I pressed the stamp into the Gelli Plate before printing.

 This was done by using a Catalyst Wedge to make marks in the plate before printing.  The Wedge was W-04.  Art Van Go supply these wedges and they are great for mark-making on the Gelli plate because they are made of silicone and shouldn't damage your Gelli surface, as long as you aren't too heavy-handed.

This was done using a feather stamp pressed into the Gelli plate.  The fabric used had already been printed (the blue colour is Pebeo Studio acrylic, an interference colour which is fabulous with the Gelli).

I like this one because it's such a bright colour.  This was made using another Catalyst Wedge.  W-03.

This is made using the homemade stamp again and the Pronty A4 Leaves mask stencil.  The colours came together really well.  Again, the Pebeo studio blue was used.

Another Catalyst wedge print.  The feather mask is also in there.

Going back to the home-made stamps.  I went on an Angie Hughes Velvet course, and she showed us how to make our own stamps.  It really opened up our imaginations for creating interesting and bold designs.   Angie then did an article on this subject for Workshop on the Web  December 2013 issue, which is a brilliant article.  We took this article to the Crafts4Crafters show as well to demonstrate how the articles can teach you skills that you can then take further.   Here are the stamps I created:

I did make some leaf skeleton stamps and plain fatter stamps to frame those.  The feather I used to print onto the Gelli plate (further above) is also made in this way.

The Show was fabulous.  All the people there were very friendly.  We met some great exhibitors, including Farno Designs, who had some fantastic hand-dyed fabrics which I used Decolourant on with various stencils.

Art Van Go Exhibition - Taking Textiles Further

I paid my first visit to Art Van Go this week.  I have seen Viv and Kev many a time when at shows, but I've never seen the Knebworth shop and gallery.  It's great!  If you love their stands at the shows, it's just like that, but with more goodies.

As there is an exhibition on at the moment by pupils of Janet Edmonds, called Taking Textiles Further, I popped over there in the week to have a look at what was there.  And also to browse around the shop without being constantly elbowed out of the way by over-excited Show Shoppers.

I loved the work that was there.  My particular favourites were pieces by Buffy Fieldhouse which used printing in line and pattern that was reminiscent of Viking Runes.  I loved the way the pieces were assembled and that they were so visually striking with effective colour palettes.

Be What You Are IV Buffy Fieldhouse

Be What You Are I - Buffy Fieldhouse

Be What You Are I - Buffy Fieldhouse

Be What You Are II - Buffy Fieldhouse

Other members of the exhibition were Mary Gamester, who had sewn this beautiful handstitched picture.  I loved the colours and design:

Marian Hall's piece Gridlock I was lovely, with little snippets of handstitching in a contrasting colour that really stood out against the dark background.

Marian Hall - Gridlock I (detail)

Marian Hall - Gridlock I

Marian Hall's work Gridlock II was also a beautfiul piece and in the contrasting panel, the gold thread outlines lifted the shapes and highlighted them (above left and detail right).


June Withers produced some fantastically bright work which I loved:

June Withers: Autumn Leaves (left), Summer Glory II (middle), Summer Glory I (right)

There were other artists exhibiting but there's not room to put them all here - shame.  It's worth a look (especially if combined with a shopping trip), and the exhibition is on until 30 November.