Playing around with bits of drawings 2

I have had another fine day playing around with some of the drawings I picked.

These were all derived from the 'landscape' made from part of a gouache painting of a shell.
The middle bottom one is most like the original drawing, but was done in graphite which I scratched with the tip of a brush, and added some pastel colour to. I think it looks hairy, like a mohair goat.
I printed lots of small copies on the computer, some indifferent colours, and then cut them up and rearranged, which made new patterns. Two of these patterns I took further - the four-branched one inspired me to print it with a potato, and then turn it into a long string (top right), and aluminium seaweed. The mirror image of part of it became the ovals bottom left, and tiling them together revealed the black winged pattern. Finally, I made a 'meta shape' by cutting through the tiled 'landscapes' and filling in the gaps with oil pastel.

I liked this one so much that I made this by layering different colours of oil pastel on top of each other on black paper. I then scraped it off to reveal all the depths of colours. I love the way this glows. It looks like beautiful rust. 

Then I went on to work on another of the drawings - this time a pencil drawing of a flower of Queen Anne's lace, which I like because of the shape, and because of the little white spikey flowers caught inside a cage made of the green parts of the leaf.

The top 2 were both made with watercolour and white oil pastel. Neither of them worked as well as I had hoped - I thought the white would resist the colour more. The bottom left painting is in water soluble inks. I chose the colours because I thought they would go well together and carry some of the light-heartedness that the plant does. I didn't put any white flowerlets in it at all, but I dont' think that matters.
The bottom right one is made of crocheted embroidery wool and silk, satin ribbon, and white card. I did this because my fingers were twitching from having done nothing directly with textiles for so long!

Finally, a more derived one - focussing on the cage and the flowers, which were made by cutting out masking tape (which was removed after the paint dried). The background was done with watercolours which I covered in crumpled cling film while it dried. It's a bit more textured in life than it looks here. I think perhaps it could have done with one more colour to keep it interesting. 

When I looked back at the course work instructions, I saw that there were two ideas I hadn't used yet - mosaic, and using all tones of the same colour. So I used them both for the 'pencil' drawing. Using mosaic with very limited variety of colours of paper made me think about the pointillism exercise again, and how I might represent changes in colour and shadow that way. I am not sure this was a very good picture to pick to do this with. Something with more subtlety might be better.
The right hand picture turned out rather interesting. I hadn't thought of using all one colour before, and I will certainly try it again after this result.It makes you focus on the shapes and texture more, and the contrast between the different tones is enhanced.   

I decided to move onto the next exercise after 'doing' four of my bits of drawings. I certainly think I have learned how to derive designs from things I have made, and how much fun it can be - and how it leads me into trying out new things. (eg the clingfilm trick, which I learned from looking through Arteffects by Jean Drysdale Brown (on the reading list for the course). It has given me a lot more reference samples for my sketchbook. And I can see how it would be possible for me to do more of this independently in future. In fact, I am looking forward to doing it with the other 3 bits of drawings in my sketchbook.