Tapa/siapo study with watercolours...

First study of Siapo/Tapa study suing Watercolours

I'm loving this new journey that I'm taking in Indigenous Art at Te Wananga o Aotearoa (level 3). I've been able to learn how to use watercolours as I've never quite understood the use of it in my earlier attempts but in having a neat teacher to help me sort out the techniques - well I'm simply loving it.

In high school I learnt to use oil paints as a medium and absolutely loved the way that it flowed onto canvas but the only trouble was that there was a lot of prep to do in working with oils which is why I switched to acrylics for my book art at it was a lot easier to use and wash up afterwards.

So now in that, I've figured out how to master shading much like in using colour pencils, (another one of my favourite mediums) I'm now using Watercolours to explore how I can use it with our next book on tatau or traditional Samoan tattooing as watercolour paper has similar properties to tapa cloth.

And in studying patterns used early tapa/siapo cloths, each panel is quite interesting as geometric shapes are used from environmental inspiration to build up art on some amazing tapa cloths. Some of the panels refer to stars, or plants and even shells or patterns that repeat themselves with a postive/negative effect.

In fact, I have a treasured piece that my mother gave to me when I was at University and I still hold it dear and when my beloved and I were married in Fiji in 2001, we were gifted with a Fijian tapa cloth as a remembrance token of our special time there. Fijian tapa designs are quite unique too in that their symbols and art work identify different symbols and colour work in their pieces.

Now looking forward to start working on the tatau/tattoo book as it has been a few years in the making from the thinking process, to the indigenous research that has gone into writing the text and now to work on the paintings, a real blessed space to be in with more to come...