Seaweed and sketchbooks

Reporting in with my discoveries from the coast of Brittany

As I begin to write, I’m gazing out of the window and you guessed - it’s raining again. The sunshine of last week in Brittany is a distant memory, and we’re back to English weather. Although I think we chose the correct week to go because apparently it’s now doing much the same there as it is here.

The good news, I was pretty good about sticking to my self-imposed one-box-and-a-bit limit of art supplies. It didn’t help helped that my husband packed the car before I’d gathered my things together, not leaving much space for all my stuff so I had limited space to play with - and to be fair, I didn’t want to take too much anyway. While I aspire to minimalism, and I’m in awe of anyone who can travel with a simple pencil roll and one sketchbook, it’s just so hard to choose and leave all the good stuff behind, isn’t it? What if I need it?

Here’s a list of what came with me

Actually, you know what? I’ll save this for another day and perhaps give you a little video tour of my Art Bag. Sounds good? Let me know!👇

For now, here’s the gist of what I took

• plastic bucket - absolutely essential to have a smallish, flexible trug-type thing with handles. Light and comfortable to carry yet large enough to hold bits and bobs such as a towel or sketchbook, and waterproof so you can put it down on damp sand or bring back tangles of seaweed...

• Messy Mat (firm plastic mat to protect the table) and an oil cloth

• small gelli plate

• acrylic paint - three primaries (Prussian blue, permanent rose, yellow ochre - a mistake), plus Payne’s grey, titanium white

• cheap A4 printer paper

• A5 sketchbook of smooth cartridge paper

• travel bottle of acrylic medium (didn’t really use)

• couple of glue sticks

• A few Posca pens (turquoise-green-ish, pink, grey)

Other things that jumped in:

My usual art bag and a pencil case, which together added all sorts of goodies including a biro, fineliner, coloured pencils, small watercolour palette, brushes, couple of slim A6 sketchbooks/notebooks, chinagraph pencil amongst other things. Out of these extras, I only used the sketchbooks and the pencils.

And this is where I surprised myself…

I actually planned ahead in an effort to stick with my minimalist aspirations! I took 12 pieces of firm mixed-media paper cut into approx 6” squares as the main ‘container’ for my artistic endeavours during the week. Not only did this provide a limit to what I could feasibly accomplish (and I need limits, otherwise I try and do too much then get cross when all the time’s gone) it also allowed me to keep up with the #100dayproject.

My biggest vice

I’m a sucker for collecting paper. All kinds of paper. Receipts, croissant bags (if you eat them quickly enough they don’t make the paper greasy), tourist brochures, news bulletins. Throwing away paper bread bags from the boulangerie? Oh no you don’t! I’ll have them, thank you.

Most French supermarkets get you to weigh and sticker your fresh produce and provide paper bags for you to do so. Here in the UK it’s usually compostable ‘plastic’ bags, but paper bags remind me of old fashioned greengrocers. So it’s all very satisfying but does result in an excess of…paper bags. Being good and imposing another limit - once again, what’s come over me? - I used one of the bags as a receptacle for all the other scraps of paper. Anything that didn’t fit when it came time to pack up, went in the recycling.

Oh, and talking of supermarkets and paper…the little village shop also has a secondhand book swap/giveaway shelf, so I nabbed a French novel with a broken spine. The pages were falling out anyway, so that’s collage/printing fodder, yes?!

…a kilo of cherry tomatoes for only a fiver!

So let’s start with collage

This is where the pre-cut squares came in. After a weekend of chasing the bike race, and a fair few coffee-and-cakes-and-baguettes…

izzymoore.art

A post shared by @izzymoore.art

These are the dunes where I walked with Uri, our Japanese friend, while husbands cycled their 105km sportive (more on this in a moment). The cyclists in this video clip are the professionals, the following day.

…I’d accumulated enough paper bits and pieces to be able to cover all the squares with a random collage of scraps, using the glue sticks. I didn’t worry excessively about arranging things in a particular way, and couldn’t be bothered with matte medium - too messy and sticky and needs to be washed out of the brush. Glue stick is easy and quick.

Next, seaweed hunting. My favourite activity. Nothing like wandering on the beach, paddling in the shallows, collecting ‘interesting’ bits and pieces. Unfortunately, I’d spent slightly too long on the collage so the tide was incoming. But I found enough for the first gelli plate session.

These first few prints on a few of the collage squares were OK-ish, but not quite what I was after. I left them to dry, and later on I added a few Posca pen lines.

A day or so later, the tides were in the right place at the right time (meaning, the right side of coffee or lunch or cake or wine o’clock) and I was able to collect a few more pieces. I also had a slightly better idea of what would work, but this was all very much a steep learning curve.

First off, I took some time to photograph my various samples. Unfortunately, I only had one scrumpled plastic file pocket with a piece of white paper shoved inside to use as a background. Nevertheless, I dutifully photographed everything, outside on the deck.

I haven’t done anything more with these pics yet, but one rainy afternoon I’ll play with my iPad and detach seaweeds from background to create seaweedy silhouettes. Thereafter, who knows - stencils? Open to suggestions!

Time for a big printing sesh!

Our very small mobile home only had a tiny table and hardly any kitchen surface, but it did have a vinyl floor and a large-ish space just inside the French doors. I tucked the chairs to one side, rolled out the oilcloth and set to, alternating between squatting and kneeling.

As I progressed through my stash of cartridge paper and my collage squares, I began to get the hang of it. Unfortunately, I started to get the hang of it after I’d already printed some of the collage squares. And you know that thing, where you think ‘all it needs is a little more x, y or z’ and so you try to do that and it ruins it? Yeah, that too. And that yellow ochre? Bleurgh, unless you like khaki.

Some of these were really pretty - until I tried to add a little something. A lot of the collage is now obliterated, which is a shame, but hey ho - don’t know unless you try!

Also, if you’ve ever played with a gelli plate, you’ll be very familiar with the thing where the more you do, the more you want to do. And you do ‘just one more’ and miraculously leave a wonderful ghost on the plate just crying out to be pulled, so you need to do another ‘one more’ which then teaches you something else, so you have to try that, then the ghost print, and on and on and on.

Some of the better prints - sadly none on the #100day collage squares

But eventually, I was done in. I’d given myself indigestion from squatting all afternoon, my knees were sore, my hands were covered in paint, as was the seaweed.

Conclusion?

• I definitely scratched the itch to gelli plate print with seaweed

• I definitely don’t want to pack a gelli plate next time, when I’ll be in a tent.

• I want to continue my experiments at home, with more space, so I did secrete a small wrapped parcel of mostly-dry seaweed into the car to do more at home…

• I mustn’t forget the small wrapped parcel of mostly-dry seaweed

• I’m sure it’ll remind me of its presence if I do

Take a closer look

But be warned - it’s not all pretty! Definitely some good, some bad and a few downright ugly!

Took me a while to work out how to do one of these flipbooks. If you like, let me know! I have various ideas for how and when I could create more. This one was thrown together to trial the idea - and as I say, it’s not all pretty! - but I’d love to know what you think of the concept….

Thank you all for your encouragement after my last post to share my seaweed passion with Uri. In the end I didn’t ask her to join me for a spot of beach foraging - the tide was in for a start, but mostly because she made the excellent suggestion of stopping in town for a coffee and cake!

the two of us, waiting for the pro bike race to go past the next day

We then walked for miles over the dunes, trying to spot a few of the sportive riders. We kept missing the cyclists, but did spot some beautiful ducks on the beach. Surprised myself all over again when the name ‘Shelduck’ popped into my head - looked it up later, and I was right.

Photo by Giulia Salvaterra on Unsplash

After our walk, I suggested a cup of tea but she wanted to go back to their apartment to wait for her husband as she had the only key. I returned to my little mobile home, with the full intention of putting the kettle on, but after a swift comparison of the time on the clock versus my husband’s predicted average speed, I reckoned I could just squeak in a 20 minute run around the block, a quick dip in the sea, and a shower before he returned. So that’s what I did. As my daughter said, “who chooses exercise and a cold swim over a cup of tea?”

ME!!!

Thank you for reading, until next time,

PS If you’re similarly inspired by all things coastal and white sand and turquoise seas, my popular Celtic Seascapes online course will be open very soon with an early bird discount for subscribers. Watch this space!