#needleworkmonday | make like an artist

I went back to see Picasso again before the exhibition finished last weekend. It was a different experience, but on both occasions I was taken with Picasso's skill and deftness, his constant fearless experimenting and his inter-relationship with other artists and artistic traditions.

I would have liked more time - even with easy access to London, I would like to be closer and have the opportunity to call in frequently for an hour or two. To look, and also to experiment myself.

Knowing it was the last visit, I came away stacked with materials I could use to continue my studies - postcards, prints and two books, one an introduction and one a catalogue of the exhibition.

One way of knowing an artist more deeply is to copy their work. It forces you to look more deeply, to pay attention, to understand more about technique and, perhaps, what the artist was expressing.

I love the colours and the colour combinations in many of the paintings in the exhibition - far beyond nice and chocolate box cover. Some colours and some motifs are definitely of their time, the early thirties, and you can see the relationship with Art Nouveau and applied arts.

This one, Reading, appears very Art Nouveau to me - the colours, the stylised head, the little floral motif on the right. One of my favourite pictures, it's quite small.

I especially like the colours in this picture and the deftness with which Picasso painted the face using a palette knive. I love the curves and the colour combinations and I wondered how they might be translated in crochet. When I called in my local yarn shop, I discovered a range by Erica Knight: Gossypium cotton which has a set of lovely unusual colours.

The Dream. You can read more about it in the Tate's press release for the Exhibition

There are two things I want to try: the shaping of the blouse with its gentle curves and shadows; and the triangular halo of the hair. I'm also interested in the bright colours - the red, blue and yellow - and the pattern on the wall. Rather than mapping out the picture with squares and calculating the stitches, I wanted to work freehand, drawing with the hook.

In no time at all, I was learning about technique, how to shape concave and convex curves, the three dimensional marks that crochet makes, the difference in appearance on each side, the technicalities of having two threads running at the same time.

At first, I didn't cut the threads, just looping threads as floats behind the work. But I realised cutting the threads gave more choices about where to start the new row, and a better finish for each area of colour.

While I was working, other things were happening: I began to get new ideas for experimenting, I wondered where I was going to keep all these samples, how I was going to organise them. Most of all, I wondered how I was going to organise myself and keep track of what I was doing.

Drawing freehand with the crochet hook, I started to explore the effects of different techniques to create curves and shape areas of colour.

I had already hit on the idea of project boxes (a sketchbook alone isn't going to work for these three-dimensional bulky objects). Then yesterday, @lloyddavis's post Keeping Going with Austin Kleon, which included the podcast below, helped me with all those things.

There's lots in this podcast, but the immediate practical things were:

• get a big box to keep everything in every time you start a project (check).
• have a small pocket sized notebook on you all the time, with a pen or pencil close by where you can jot down ideas as they occur through the day.
• have a bigger notebook, like a journal, that you use to gather your ideas together and reflect on them (Austin gets through a fat one of these every few weeks).
• he does this journal writing in the morning, when he is at his best. He was doing it at night, but it worked better in the morning. I guess you find the time that is right for you.

There's a big emphasis on paper in this podcast. Austin felt that paper was more durable. I guess you could also use your phone to note things and take photographs, if that works for you.

I want to finish with this podcast which looks at how Picasso created this painting.

Nude Woman in Red Armchair. This is a large painting and my photograph doesn't do the colours justice. It's well worth watching the podcast for a better reproduction.