first paper workshop.

We were lucky enough to have paper artist Richard Sweeney lead our first workshop; Sweeney is a leading paper artist who has single-handedly created some amazing sculptures using only one medium... paper!

Richard Sweeney with one of his pieces.  © Luke Hayes

In this workshop, we were given multiple sheets of a5 paper, and asked to create some basic paper sculptures using some of the techniques shown to us by Richard at the beginning of the session; cutting, scoring, tearing & folding.

These are the first sculptures I created in the workshop session:

This one was made by cutting an a5 piece of paper from top to bottom, then bottom to top in an alternating fashion. I've drawn out an explanitory illustration:

The dashed lines are where I cut the paper, using a scalpel.

After I did this, I cut horizontal slots in the strips that were created, and looped each strip back on itself:

My other experimental a5 piece is shown below:

I created this piece by cutting lines outwards from the centre of the a5 sheet, and then cutting a slot to loop the created sections on themselves. At first I wasn't very happy with this piece, but when I started to photograph it, I discovered that using different camera angles can really make something look different:

I really like how the sculpture looks here, because it actually looks like a sculpture!

Next we explored a bit further and I decided to make some more complicated pieces involving folding techniques:

I made this one by cutting the a5 sheet into a square, then folding it so that there was a point in the middle, then refining the lines so that the above model was created.

Pictured here is the same model from above, with a variation of it.. we had to focus on variations of the same type of model. So basically I had chosen to make models that are folded differently to each other.

I decided next to make lots of this particular variation, using different sizes of square paper (but all under a5 of course); 15cm, 12.5cm, 10cm, 7.5cm and 5cm.


Then I stacked them up, biggest on the bottom and smallest on the top:

 

And then again, with the smallest on the bottom and the largest on the top:

 

So that's what went down in the first workshop.

I've had some difficulty with my camera over the past few weeks and had to actually buy a new one in order to take some of these pictures, so my progress has been hindered, but hopefully now I can get a move on and put some more content in my blog!

Oh and one last picture of my coursemates working nice and hard in the first workshop ;)

hahah :) 

laine. x