Odilia Bird FDA

 Paper making: As a quick exploration I wanted to have a go at paper making, to do this me and a few of my course mates ripped up a variety of paper, soaked them in a tub of water and used a hand blender to create a paste. We then used trays with sieves attached to them, dipped them into the paste and flattened them to create sheets of paper of different sizes. As a way to relate this process to my current project and nature I decided to add some pressed flowers into the sheets of paper. This not only added some much needed colour to my grey paper but also created an interesting composition. I love the rough edges that can been seen in these pieces, I think that they add to the natural nature of the work and create an organic feeling. One thing I really like about these sheets of paper are the small faults, tears and wrinkles that can be seen, there is something beautifully imperfect about them, they are clearly hand made and the rougher finish allows them to feel homely. Alth...

 Natural uv Cyanotypes: To make these cyanotypes I painted a mixture of water paper and cotton rag paper with cyanotype solution and then dried them using a hair dryer. I then put them outside during the afternoon and put my pieces of acetate on top, I then left them outside for a few hours. Unfortunately, when washing the paper the images washed out completely and either nothing stayed or barley any of the image could be seen. This was a failed attempt and looking back I believe that it likely could have been because by using a hairdryer the mixture just didn't have enough time to properly imbed itself into the paper, but there are other factors that could have contributed such as a cloudy sky and low light. To try to fix this I decided to prepare some paper the night before and let them dry naturally over night and see how this affects my next attempt.

 Mount board scenes and Acetate: After speaking with my tutor, they suggested that instead of cardboard I could use mount board to create the scenes that I wanted with more ease, What I needed to do was score into the black mount board with a scalpel or craft knife and then peel away specific sections to create a monochrome scene. To do this I chose 6 images from my photography work earlier in the project and printed them out so I have a bigger reference image to look at. I used A4 mount board to create these images.  1 This first image was the one that I found the hardest. It was of a photograph of a barn so there were lots of straight, geometric lines that could be seen. However, I keep getting confused about which sections I was supposed to be peeling off and which ones I was leaving so I accidentally peeling off sections I hadn't planned to. Although this was annoying for me at the time I don't think that it had much of a negative effect on the final outcome of the work. W...