I love going to weaving workshops. Conversation about weaving, technical training about weaving, meeting other weavers, and looking at images of tapestries -- it is all very productive in that it makes me full of desire to get back to weaving.
Last weekend I attended a one-day workshop about designing for tapestry weaving. It was taught by Liza Collins at the Southwest School of Art here in San Antonio. She is the person who taught me tapestry weaving, and whose class I took an uncountable number of times. It was the only class available to me, and I like Liza, so I kept signing up. Last year they broke the class into several parts, so I was able to take this one-day design course. Liza had intended it to be a hand's-on, bring colored pencils, let's begin an image sort of class, but it always turns into more of a discussion and analysis. People have brought their ideas, and then a brainstorming session follows, with Liza talking about technique and design issues, and everyone chiming in with ideas. I loved it.
I brought some of the photographs I took in Beijing last year. Beijing is very gray -- the buildings tend to be gray stone or cement, the sky is gray, mornings very misty. People say smoggy but it honestly did not smell or feel smoggy. It felt like fog. And in the midst of all this gray I kept seeing pops of red. A vivid red.
I tend to weave in brilliant colors, it tends to be all about color, and suddenly the challenge of thinking in grays occurred to me. One old book on tapestry techniqes, I remember, recommended that new weavers use only shades of gray, in order to learn value and shading, so important to understanding basic design principles. I began thinking in terms of subdued colors: shades of gray (a phrase now ruined for me by those stupid books) or shades of other grayed colors, but with a shocking pop of a bright color. Like this picture, taken in Tianemen Square.
Gray skies, foggy, gray buildings, gray stone, with that brilliant sign and the guy's red shoes. I have an entire Flickr album called China Red with pictures like this. The one we discussed in class was this one, taken in one of Beijing's hutongs, or traditional neighborhoods.
One problem I have working from photographs is my tendency to start thinking in terms of reproducing the photograph. Not interesting, and not the point. One way I use to get around that is to load the photograph into digital editing software and just play with effects: intensifying the colors, inverting the colors, using silly filters that "posterize" the image, "Warhol" the image, make it sepia toned or all green, the goal being to break away from the idea of reproducing a photographic image. We talked about the different textures here, as well as that pop of red. We also talked of my need to get someone to tell me what the characters say if I am going to actually use them in a tapestry. Don't want to be like one of those guys who get a tattoo in another language without knowing what it means. I am going to be sampling different material for different textures. Liza even suggested using paper pulp pressed onto the warp threads for that lighter cement revealed where the bricks are missing. Very cool idea. I am also going to play with using cotton floss there instead of wool weft. To get away from the photographic image this time, I am going to try drawing this image. I will document the design process of this tapestry here. I am also going to make sure I have a warp on a loom at all times, for sampling and for play. I did that, put the loom on the floor, and the cats decided they loved rubbing against the warp. Time to put on a new warp.
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