NID has two course streams – the 4 year undergraduate which is a more intensive course or the 2 year post graduate where students arrive after completing an often unrelated degree elsewhere. We arrived in the 2nd week of a 4 week course with the 1st year post grad textile students. The professor of the class was a very famous graphic designer who had even taught Soumitri in his day, however we had the unfortunate problem of only being able to comprehend approximately 20% of what he said due to his heavy accent and, he later told us, bad smoking habit. The other students did the rest of the interpretation and we managed.
Our initial task was to draw elements from nature that we found around the campus such as leaves, bark etc. From this exercise we were to the take aspects of the image and develop the elements of texture into different studies. The next exercise was to create a frame and develop small windows of form from the larger drawing. These exercises continued and we were encouraged to push each exploration as far as we could to achieve the final motif. We then explored the same concept in colour and developed small images of abstract form.
By the end of the two weeks we had created a small portfolio that demonstrated the steps of taking a replica image from nature and developing it into an abstract form that could be used in block printing.
Development of Form from Nature Studies
Further Abstract Development of Form in Colour
