I’ve led many artist demonstrations at Opus over the last few years, but yesterday I attended my first as a participant. Tara Galuska is an illustrator working with paper, and I was curious to attend her demo and see up close how she creates some of her work.

She led about fifteen of us in a two hour workshop on making a papercraft moth. Tara provided us all with a template to follow and we were left to our own devices to customize our moths through paper and design choices. Below are some of the finished moths by class participants.

I enjoyed this class because it allowed me to work with paper in a different way than my usual approach. I love the little moth I created, and the process gave me lots of new things to think about.

A couple of weeks ago I took a one day work shop on Islamic Design with Eric Broug through Maiwa School of Textiles. I thought it would be a good opportunity to build on the pattern work I’d been doing earlier in the summer, and figure out how to draw these complex geometric designs from scratch.

This is a piece I started a few days after the workshop, which has a six pointed star as its basic structure. I wanted to create a piece that has my standard freeform patterns within a more structured design. I’m satisfied with it so far and have yet to decide on what else to do with it.

The two stars are within an octagon, and everything is inside a circle. I want this piece to be a circle when I am finished with the stars more smoothly incorporated into the work. I’ve been working on this much more slowly than usual because it may not be anything other than an experiment.

I’m allowing myself the space for things to go horribly wrong, but also wonderfully right.

I’ve been taking the bus more often this summer because of my trips across town to The Leeway studio. I use paper tickets, and at one point realized there were a whole lot of them in my bag. So I decided to consciously collect them and see how many I would end up with.

The pile of tickets pictured here is from a fairly short amount of time, which makes me wonder how many I would now have if I’d done this from the start of summer.

I don’t yet have any specific plans for these but I’m going to continue collecting the tickets and see what they eventually become.

The screen prints pictured here are tests to see how the paper I use in my paper cutting work will take to the ink. I wanted to see how much this type of paper would warp, and what it will be like to cut with the ink on its surface. It has actually held up pretty well.

I cut two of the same stencils using a compass cutter and didn’t worry too much about a design. This is four layers of ink using the two stencils. I used the same colours as with the previous batch of prints.

The next step is to see what this paper is like to cut.

This week I’ve been doing screen printing during my time at The Leeway, and OMG (!!!) do I love the pieces I produced. My intention was to rework some initial prints I did about a month ago which I wasn’t happy with. I cut a few simple stencils at home using craft paper and decided to print multiple layers over the same paper and see where things would end up.

I tried screen printing for the first time about a month ago, and only now do I realize I didn’t share any of that work on my blog (but I did post it to Instagram). I was given a lesson in screen printing stencils by Vanessa Hall-Patch, the Shop Technologies Coordinator at The Leeway studio. She is an expert at printing processes and I feel lucky to have access to her advice and knowledge as I mess about.

The first set of prints above ended up being about six layers of ink using three different stencils. I made my decisions about colour and composition on the fly, and used remains of ink Vanessa brought for me from the print making studio downstairs. It was enjoyable to have access to so much colour!

The second batch of prints has five layers of ink and was done with three stencils (two are identical because I cut multiples at the same time). I worked in the same way as the first batch of prints, making things up as I went and stuck with the same colour scheme because I liked it. This series of prints is my favourite of the two.

My original intention was to rework these prints with more colour and texture, and eventually transform the paper into a three dimensional object. Now I like them as they are, and I’m not sure if I will go ahead with my plan.

Earlier this week I mentioned recently spending time in the studio experimenting with more paper crafting techniques. I shared the iris fold piece in a previous blog post, and now here is a modular origami sculpture I started on the same day. I think working with the colourful patterned paper, with dots on one side and stripes on the other, was half the fun.

This project is inspired by a tutorial I’ve had booked marked on Pinterest for months -> DIY Origami Art by Coco Sato for Design*Sponge Her version is more elegant than mine, but I think the crazy colours and textures make it more interesting.