Chapter 2: Spiral warm-up exercises

First task in this chapter was to choose two complementary colours. I returned to my photographs and to my colour wheel for this. I was initially drawn to the turquoise of the stained glass ammonite shell, but I realise that this is so often my 'comfort' palette - several rooms in my home and a lot of my clothes fall into this colour scheme. And so I chose the sunflower centre and the purple begonia leaves instead.

 Fig. 1

I played around a bit with my gouache paints - mixing shades and tints of my two colours, then beginning with a block of yellow, I gradually added more and more purple until I reached the pure purple block at the top of the right hand column. Finally I did a colour matching with some of my threads.

Fig. 2

Fig.3

I coloured a variety of papers and mono-printed spirals onto some of them with my gelli-plate (Figs 2 and 3).

 Fig.4

A trip to London yielded more spiral photographs which I seem to have added in here just for good measure - lovely wrought iron gates in Hyde Park and a whole collection of decorative ironwork in the V&A museum.

 Fig.5

I attempted to cut spirals which matched some of my research images from paper and also glued a string spiral to this page too.

 Fig.6

Figure 6 shows some twisted strips of paper in an attempt to recreate my spiralling chimneys. Oh, and a piece of tissue covered wire twisted into a spiral too.

 Fig.7

Fig.8

Figures 7 and 8 show my attempts at three-dimensional spirals. I could only find 5 metre rolls of corrugated card in the shops in town - which to be honest is more than any normal person could ever find a use for so I had to satisfy myself with the few small pieces that I managed to salvage from my craft box and the recycling. Some of the shapes have been highlighted with a gold paint.

 

Fig. 9

 

Fig. 10

Finally for this chapter I played on the computer. I don't have a paint programme as such on my PC but did manage some quite pleasing spiralling effects with the filters in Photoshop Elements. I was quite intrigued by image number 5 in Fig. 10 - by how applying the grain filter first darkened the image considerably. I shall definitely be returning to these again in the future as several of the experiments I made, which didn't result in spirals, were beckoning me to stitch.