Stage 3 Developing my design.

Using viewing frames on the images from my theme book and stage 2.

First, I used a frame in the shape made for the moth eye development:

This, from my mark-making folder, has something of the quality of lightness and rising lines that I think expresses the sound quite well. It also has a bit of iridescence and an organic look ecause of the spots of blurred dark on the right.

This one has a good rhythm to it, and again the spiky sound waves appeal.

This one looks more like a sea plant than an insect or sound - because of the dull colours and the thickness of the lines I think. The combination of the star in the middle and the fan shape is appealing but not for this project.

The horizontal straight line just doesn't sit right in this curved shape.

This section is interesting and complex with lots of texture contrasts.

I tried it the other way round, but again the horizontal line doesn't work so well for me.

Finally, this was the head of the cicada, with eyes. I like this image and the eyes especially are contrasting in shape, texture and shininess. But it isn't really abstract enough for this shape of viewer.










Using a section of wing as a viewer:

The shading from dark and the curved
bottom to lighter at the sharper top
works well in this one, but the 3D effect
makes it look too plump for my purposes

This one has an insect-like minute hair
quality to the curves that appeals to me,
as do the colours and shading.

This has more of an abstract look.
I think it may be very interesting if repeated.

Drawings made through wing section frames:

Although there isn't much difference between this and the sections above, drawing them clarified for me that the sound waves worked better on the edges than in the middle of the shape, and that the scales made it easy to graduate the shade/ colour within the shape while adding texture. 

Drawings made through square viewing frames:

Some samples:

I made some samples from the square images, using silk paint and gutta:

This one reflected the sound wave shape.

I like the way the yellow and lighter green seem to melt into each other, and I'm thinking I could use the darker, less continuous shapes to go at the edges of the wing sections.

There's a shininess to the gutta which is interesting and perhaps useful in this context.

For this one I made the wing vein shapes, and some texture marks along the bottom of each section, graduating to dots in the middle. Each section has darker bluer green at the bottom, and grass green at the top. When I had done these greens it looked rather boring and I thought it might be good to have a contrasting reddish purple, like the colour of the insect's legs. I put spots of this colour where the texture was graduating. It would have worked better if i had made rings so they remained small circumscribed dots instead of spreading out. But the additional colour was a good idea. The grass green perhaps isn't quite yellow enough to make a good contrast in this one - more yellow at the tops of the sections?

Then I flipped the first image on the computer, and saw what it looked like when reflected.

This certainly appeals to me, and the top one looks quite like the sound wave. I think there is something very busy about both the sound of a cicada group, and about the idea of a million tiny insects all chorusing together to make that loud loud noise.

The busyness of this image is a bit like that for me.

I'm also starting to like the greens a bit more than I did.

This one was trying to see what it would look like in the context of variably-sized and shaped wing sections.

This was my first attempt at making a sound wave with wire.

This one is the same wire, interwoven with lines of fishing line attached to a frame.

This appeals to me, although it is a rather literal representation of sound waves, and doesn't have any of the insect part of the experience of the sound of cicadas.

This started as an outline of the veins of the wing, and finished when I tried to do some tapestry weaving with fishing line vs green embroidery yarn.

The veins worked reasonably well, although I need to pay some attention to where the wire starts and finishes. The tapestry weaving failed showing me that I cannot use it like this. The ends have to be secured elsewhere, and then cut off, so it's not suitable for something where I want them to wind round the supports

Drawings of 3D shapes:

These were fun to do but didn't seem to have much to contribute to my design.

These, on the other hand, were interesting, and made me think more about what  I was going to do inside the wing sections. The top left and bottom right ones appealed to me especially and made me think about the three dimensional effect of these patterns a bit more.








To get an idea of how the piece might look against a body, I drew the wing vein shapes onto a white T-shirt, and then used white machine embroidery within one of the shapes. It didn't work very well. Putting the texture between the veins destroyed the light fragile wing appearance. 

I have been thinking about how to make a frame for this collar that will be strong enough to keep its shape, but still flexible enough to tremble a little when the person wearing it moves around (to reflect the vibrations of the sound). I tried making a wing out of wire. I didn't want it to be shiny, and luckily had some very rusty wire left in the basement by a previous resident of the house. The thickness of it was not enough to support any shape on its own, but when twisted into a wing like this it did have more strength to it.  

This is the frame for the front, in the process of construction.

After this I thought about what the final piece would look like, and drew this...

This idea used the wire veins to support a collar, with a green wire sound wave with projecting wires around the back of the head, topped with pairs of bead 'eyes'. The fabric behind the wires is painted with fabric paints in a pattern suggested by the moth's eye. There are contrasting squares of plum colour as there is on the legs of one of the actual cicadas.

Once I had drawn it out, this pattern seemed too heavy - in the complexity of the pattern, the intensity of the colours, and in the size and shape of the collar support.

Time to think again.