Plugging along

I have been doing my homework for my course, and playing around with ideas with a few friends, but nothing much is inspiring me at the moment. Maybe it's the changing seasons - I always blame the weather.

But here is something I have been doing:
My friends and I got together to do some mono printing. I had looked it up and saw one article about finger painting style.  Reverting back to teaching young children crops up often in my work, I am discovering.

Our design task after one class was to use analogous colours, with one opposite colour, and a leaf motif. As usual, I got a lot of ideas while taking Penny for walks.  I noticed quite a lot of green leaves (no surprise there) and that there is often a red element to the plants.  So I dutifully took photos.

I decided to combine our play day with the leaf and colour task and came up with a few pieces of fabric.  I used white fabric first, then green, as it is sort of analogous to the green fabric paint I was using.

We also had to vary the colour from dark to light, so I put in some black at one end and white at the other. It meant I lost the original colour but I didn't worry about that too much. 

Then I decided to use some actual leaves and put the fabric paint over them, then brayer the fabric over the top.  This turned out quite well. 

I haven't done much with them yet, apart from using an old lino cut piece to put the contrasting colour on. I will try some free motion quilting later, if I get around to it. I don't think it is a particularly successful piece but it was interesting to do and has opened my eyes to some possibilities.