The trip gave me the time to concentrate on making work for the fun of it given that I only took the minimum of art supplies with me, paper, pencils and a few watercolours. I used the artwork around the school and its surroundings for inspiration.
I particularly liked the carved figure heads made from all sorts of materials, stone, plaster, wood and chose four of them to base work on. I used thin brown paper and a graphite stick to take rubbings of their faces. I then laid opaque acetate over this and drew over the facial features that I wanted to accentuate. I taped the acetate back onto the original heads as a way to explore how my interpretations of the features might alter the appearance. I took photographs of each step.
Photographs taken by Kathryn Raffell, March 2015, documenting the stages in a piece of work using a plaster figure cited outside the Art School.
Photographs of the second carved figure I explored in a graphite rubbing.
Yet another one of the figures in the art school garden that I used to make work from. This one was particularly interesting as the colour of the plaster used ahowed through the acetate to give the face a skin tone.
This carved wooden head was the least effective through the rubbing. Perhaps the graphite pencil was too harsh a medium to use.
