Another quick recap
In our last post we welcomed Amy, our artist, and what we planned on making with her. We spoke about how we planned on incorporating traditions and folklore into our big guy. This post we will go over each part of the process: from the brainstorming to the crafting.
Making the Green Spirit
Exploring ideas
To start off our project, Amy supplied us all with materials such as a variety of fabrics and prints to create a collage of general ideas for our puppet, and many, many books on folk culture and art, similar to what we planned on creating. This simple task brought out a range of creative and exciting ideas that birthed the big guy we have today.
Linocuts
One of the skills Amy taught us is lino cutting. For those who haven't heard of it, lino cutting is a method of printing where you carve a design on a sheet of lino, coat it in printing ink, and print your design on a material - just remember that the bits you carved out won't be coloured! The designs we made with the lino were used to create a digital design (the colour adjusted to green) to be printed onto the fabric our green man will wear.
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Cyanotypes
Cyanotype is another method of printing that, instead of using ink or paint, uses a chemical reaction caused by UV light and a two-part chemical fluid. Unlike other printing methods, as the name suggests, the result of this method is restricted to a blue tone. We created designs with flowers, leaves, buttons, letters and lace that will be added to the fabric alongside the lino prints.
Willow work and lantern making
This task was one of the trickiest of the bunch. Not only because of the tape and sticky paper, but also because of the (practically) endless possibilities. To craft with willow, so that it isn’t too brittle, you soak it by totally submerging it in clean water and leave it to soak for a day - make sure to not leave it for too long that it becomes slimy though! After it’s been soaked, take it out of the water and stand it upright to allow excess water to run off, and wrap it in an old towel or blanket overnight. After that, the willow is much more malleable and the perfect material to use to craft lanterns.
To decorate these lanterns, after moulding the willow into anatomical shapes of forest creatures and flowers, we wrapped lights around the inside structures and used wet strength tissue paper and PVA glue on the outside to create a lantern effect - we then decorated them with coloured paper and other fabrics (and this was the method we used to create the body and head of our puppet).
