Module 5-Chapter 11 Design from Landscape - Divisions

For my finished piece I was inspired by a sentence found in a beautiful book on the area where I took my pictures,  At some stage the author said that nature "healed itself". In fact the area and the surrounding woods were laboured quite intensively some time ago when they extracted iron ore. This has changed the landscape and also the vegetation.

So I decided to make a long strip representing a (medical) bandage on a bobbin.

The design obviously had to fit the subject. I wanted the width to be about 10 cm. It would be difficult to make something narrower. For the length I was thinking of the Fibonacci sequence, as suggested by Siân. The strip should be about 80 cm to allow for divisions into 40, 25 and 15 cm.

I made a bobbin out of polymer clay as I couldn't find one with the right measurements and made a mock-up

Then I looked at the different designs that could be translated into a strip

I finally decided to contentrate on 2 designs and tried to translate it into a long strip

Design 1a and b

Design 2a
as you can see I had turned the last smaller part upside down. This gave me the idea to change the directions of the different parts

I found that this design had a much nicer "flow", the different sections are larger and it would be easier to translate them into fabric.

This is the final design I'd like to use. I connected the different pieces to make one long harmonious strip.

And finally I finished my bobbin
I wanted it to look like an old rusted spool. For this I made a base with white polymer clay as you can see in the mock-up from before. This was then covered with  brown clay lightly textured, painted with Golden iron oxyde then rusted. The spool was baked after each section of work.
I'm quite happy with the result and think that it doesn't look at all like polymer clay anymore.

 

Module 5-Chapter 11 Design from Landscape- Landscapes part 1

I went back into the woods to take some more pictures that could lead to a "landscape translation"

Some designs are far too complex and would have to be simplified to become appropriate to the subject and to be translated into fabric