In the derive project we had to walk to a point on a map, wandering as we went and collecting as much data as possible. I also wrote my streams of consciousness for part of the walk. I took rubbings of trees and picked up leaves, and as I passes puddles I started to think about how I could collect data from them. At first I tried to lay paper in the puddles, but this didn’t work as the puddles were not muddy enough to deposit anything meaningful onto the paper. I instead decided to order some test tubes online and collect water in these. I also took images of the walk on a disposable camera.

I also did a screen print based on one of the images I took of the overflowing river going through the centre of town. It was a monoprint as I used the screen-printing inks to paint the image through the screen.

The image is the reflected water from the river, it is a reflection of a fence. I drew through the screen with charcoal to make the fence and then use a clear medium to seal it.

I also did some dark room photography of the river- I am going to make a separate blog post about this. I used a photo during this photography and it inspired me to make a painting of it as I loved how the river looked misty and dream-like.

The image is portrait which is unusual as it depicts a landscape, but because of the shape of the water this works; the water is long and thin. What looks like a river is actually a meadow called the Water Meadow, and it is part of Magdalen College in Oxford. It is called the Water Meadow a it is a flood plain for the river to empty onto if it overflows due to rain.

The painting on the right is an oil painting onto a sheet of A4 sized acetate. It was heavily inspired by the darkroom photography I had done, where I used a pen to make marks that represented the shape of the meadow and trees. This is a more abstract representation of the original image.

The watercolour painting on the left is a more literal representation of the original image. I used masking fluid to block off parts of the painting that I wanted to be lighter; such as the tree in the foreground on the right. I worked wet on wet for the most part, building up colour gradually until the paint was thicker and the colours were rich. The reference image didn’t have as much colour in the trees, but I wanted to add more colour because I thought that it suited the scene and it made this painting have more contrast with the oil painting.

I have paired these two paintings together because they are depicting the same image, and also because they show my skills in using both oil and watercolour; mediums that work very differently. They also show different levels of abstraction. I would have liked the oil painting to turn out more abstract and have thicker layers of paint on it, but it would not have dried fast enough if I had done this so I opted for thinner layers of paint.