Taking Pictures, Creating an Image

Welcome all! So this week I’m going to take you through the initial planning stages of my piece and my thought processes of what I think is maybe going to happen (if everything goes to plan!). Let’s get into it…

So I knew I wanted the piece to be about the view from a train window, so the most important part was thinking about how I would get inspiration of this subject matter. In my University degree it was really important that we focused on primary images (which are images you have taken yourself) to create artwork from, to make sure the artwork you’re creating is unique and that you don’t copy anyone else. With this in mind, I took a train from Sheffield Station to Chesterfield Station and took some images, you guessed it, looking out of the window!

Here are some of the images I took!

Now, I’m not a photographer, I don’t have a professional camera and I was on a moving train…so the pictures aren’t very good quality, some are blurry and some have reflections from inside the train. I also struggled as there was a lot of industrial and residential areas and a few very large walls on this journey so there was a very short window of time to get landscape views that I really wanted. I thought on my feet and took a short video on my phone, meaning I could capture lots of footage in one go, then go back and look at it once I was back home. I slowed the video footage down and took screenshots of frames that I really liked.

Here’s one of the videos!

Doing this gave me some pretty nice images but me and the Artworks Together team thought it would be really great if the art piece had part of the train track showing. In the landscape shots I really liked, the track wasn’t part of the image. So I decided to collage 2 images together, which I could then create a sketch of to fully combine the two photos, and use this as my reference to create the tapestry from!

I used watercolour paints and coloured pencils to create the small sketch drawing, which will be a really helpful reference to look back on over the next few months as I create the tapestry section by section, layer by layer

Supplies used:

Watercolours: Winsor & Newton Artist’s Choice watercolour set

Coloured Pencils: Caran d’Ache Supracolor pencils

Paper: Daler Rowney Finegrain Heavyweight 200gsm paper

Next week I’ll be going through the material I have chosen for the tapestry and how I will create the background! Thank you for reading along, stay safe and keep creating,

Jodie