Making with Meaning - Day 3

Today I started by drawing an image of a car seat from a 1969 Ford, onto Lino.  I cut the shape of the car seat from the Lino and was a bit worried about the stark simplicity of the shape.  I need not have worried.  I printed 20 car seats across the bottom of the sketchbook, then a gap, then more car seats.  The machinists used to make 20 seats an hour (and the men machinists, working nights, did about 20 per shift! and got paid more!).

With Caroline Bartlett, tutor

Set out to dry overnight

As it's too long 

To lie flat 

along the whole length

of the print table.

Then I had a conversation with Caroline about what to do next.  She suggested exploding the component parts - and here I realised I'd taken the car seat and worked backwards to identify the 'collection' that I wanted to work from - it's the individual pieces of the car seat.  So I cut another Lino, using a slightly bigger image (to allow for seam allowances) then cut it apart into the different pattern pieces.  I carved the Lino so the pieces would print as an outline.  Not greatly successful - lines were too chunky to give the effect of a blueprint drawing.  Then I tried drawing round the pattern pieces.  Better but not quite right.  Not sharp enough.  Not industrial enough.  I tried multiples.   Random scattered outlines were nice and arty, but not symptomatic of a machine shop.  Overlapping and close spaced looked quite good.  Then Caroline suggested getting some carbon paper (from the shop, tomorrow) which might just have the right feel.  

Feeling a bit worried about wrecking my work so far, so tomorrow morning I will do quite a bit of sampling before going onto the sketchbook.  We only have half a day, so I hope I get stage 3 completed.  Roll on tomorrow!