I’m never really satisfied with my drawing skills. Drawing is like writing. The only way to get better is to keep drawing. I cut better than I draw. Which sounds stupid until you look at the cuttings Mattise did at the end of his life. He couldn’t paint with his limitations, so he did cut outs instead. They are magnificent!
I don’t know that my cut outs work that well. But I am more confident with them for floral/tree ideas. So when I went to make a rosiated spoonbill nest (which is basically sticks), I cut out branches rather than try to draw them.
Of course, they’re flat before you stitch them. There’s about three colors of brown hand dye in them. But the stitching is the definition.
Usually, I build bark with my stitching. With this much going on, it’s hard to see, but I added a layer and savaged it to make bark that pealed and curved.
This time I went for something a bit different.
Laws puts out drawing how-to and journaling books that I really like.
Not only does it show you how to draw an object. It gives you a thousand ways to see what it looks like at a different angle or at a different point of view. And how and why it changes. I turn to these books to push myself to better drawing.
Every piece involves an endless number of choices. Sometimes I think it’s fun to share them with you. Creation is a journey best taken with friends.
I love the woods. I can’t walk in them anymore. I can’t walk anywhere far at any length. But I can make the woods for myself.
I’ve been working on a roseated spoonbill for some while. I chose a fabric that had that deep wood blue greens in it. With a big pink bird on it, I knew I was on the right track.
I considered what kinds of trees I wanted. I wanted a deep wet swamp. Pine trees would work for that. I made beautiful deep green branches on them.
I pinned up my gorgeous trees and watched them disappear into the background.
Back to redesign. That kind of redesign takes me a minute. I left it up on the wall a bit to think. Yesterday I dusted the tops of the branches with the brightest light greens I had in my threads.
They looked much better.
Then I put them up and photoed them. They looked great on the photo wall.
Odd things happen with photos. I usually take photos of what I’ve done at the end of the day as a record of my process. I give the photos to the owners when they purchase a quilt to invite them into my process. I don’t always remember what exactly I did, so it’s a good practice.
This time the photos deceived me. The trees looked way too bright. But when I came back to the studio, they looked so much better.
I’ve had another problem with this piece all along. I couldn’t get the head pointed the right way. I cut the head off so I could reposition it, but it’s still not right.
Yes, you can cut embroideries apart. After enough stitching, who would know? I do it whenever needed.
So I separated the neck and tucked it in at a stronger angle. It pleases me more. She looks like the birds have disturbed her but she’s in motion.
Do I know what I’m doing? Don’t be silly. I try things, put them on the wall and stare them down until I’m sure.
The tool that makes this all possible is my photo wall. If I don’t take the time to look at it, I really won’t know when it’s not right. Why?
Because I don’t want to take the time. I want to get done. That doesn’t always work. Two days looking at the piece is infinitely better than knowing forever I needed to move something over 1/2″. Or ripping it out.
If you don’t have a photo wall, you should. You’ll never know what you’ve got until you really look at it. For more information about building a photo wall, look up Studio Essentials: The Glory of the Photo Wall
Nature loves camouflage. A great deal of nature is brown. Brown isn’t necessarily boring, but it does have a way to go to be showy.
There are tricks for that. All brown is made up of complementary mixes. Red and green make brown. Yellow and purple make brown. The cool thing about it is that they don’t make the same browns. Although any complementary pair you choose is essentially a primary color and a secondary color, everything is made from the primaries themselves. Every brown is made of yellow, red, and blue. But the mixes aren’t quite the same and the glory is in the details.
So we can mix brown with thread, as easily as we could mix it with paint.
But past that. brown shows up as neutral. Which means it hasn’t much impact. So what can we do to add interest? Add texture.
I’ve worked on bird feathers for a couple of years now. It’s kind of a quest. In the same way there are stipple patterns, there are shading patterns. I’m working on those to try to create the different feathers on birds.
Pinion feathers
Every bird has different kinds of feathers for different reasons. Pinions to support flight. Fluff for warmth. Tiny feathers that cover skin. They are very different in texture.
Fluff
This is a texture for the fluff feather I’m trying out here. It’s a different shape that gives us the feather feeling.
I’m also using a long/short stitch as a fill-in for the breast. It fills in with different colors, giving a bird that stripey look.
The feet are done with three colors of threads in an uneven grid.
Finally, to crisp up the image, I outlined it in a bright cream.
After all of that, the birds are still brown. But the heads sort of fixed that for me. They really are that blue. How cool is that!
I talk alot about color theory, choosing of threads and creating color schemes. The nature of thread painting is no different than any other art. It’s a creating of colors from components. How you arrange those components changes the effect you get.
I usually line up colors light to dark and add in a shocker and a shader. That color scheme gives us a smooth layer of color that builds on itself. It’s pretty. But it hasn’t got a whole lot of depth.
Sometimes I separate the the scales into a dark and light zone. That creates a deep separation on the scales without any shading. That’s pretty too.
I wanted something different for this fish. I wanted the scales deeply separated and clear. So I underpainted my fish first in blues, purples and greens, and then over painting with yellows and oranges.
Is it extra work? Yep. Would I do it all the time? Probably not.
But one of the wonders of doing Koi is their textures. The textures of fins and scales and their sense of motion is all of that.
So I started underpainting with the complements of the piece. Since the fish is yellow orange, the underpainting should be blue. green and purple.
He’d be pretty if I just continued in that range. Instead, after establishing the darker underpainting, I painted over with yellow and orange threads.
After that, I added a light layer of turquoise metallic thread for flash and black outline for definition.
This is where I think I’m going with this. The underpainting separates and lifts each scale and the outlining nd flash stitching punches it visually.
If you are keeping score of colors on the color wheel, you’ll notice it has a full range of analogous colors from Yellow, green, purple to blue.
Is one method better. Heavens, no! It’s a matter of having choices and knowing what those choises offer you. Now I’m off to stitch rocks and hostas.
I’m worn out after doing a bunch of big pieces. Big is of course, relative. I consider anything past 33″ x 43″ largish. I like workin that size. But the last ones have stretched larger, and I’m tired of shoving large wads of fabric through the machine.
I’ve been working on a white garden piece. The idea came fromThe White Garden, a speculative fiction about Virginia Wolf. She was thinking about an all white garden for the blackout, so that the moon would show on the white petals. I found some embossing plates that were wonderful prarie grasses. I put them on dark blue hand dye in shades of white and blue.
I’ve never had the dicipline to plant only white flowers. Too much of a color junkie. But I love the idea.
This is a visual path piece. It’s about 12″ x 45″ So everything has to be tiny.
So I made a strip of white and pale flowers. But then it needed moonlight and bugs. No one said the bugs had to be white.
How is tiny embroidery different than large pieces. Several things work differently. First off, I want to avoid a thick outline. So instead of embroidering on a sandwich of hand-dye, felt, stitch and tear, and totally stable, I left out the hand dye, and embroidered on the felt instead. Since I wqs using black outlines, I used black felt. Using felt reduces the bulk, but I found it could not be ripped out or sewn over. This is partially why I made a lot more bugs than I would need.
I could have embroidered tiny pieces within the piece. But I chose not to this time. It still makes for a lot of distortion. So I did a batch of moths, fireflies, snails and rocks.
Embroidering tiny pieces insists upon simplification. The usual shocker-shader colors are too much. A simple range works better: gold and green, white and blue, green and blue.
The fireflies are also mostly unshaded. There’s no room for anything except the primary colors of red and green.
So my white garden is full of wild color, very tiny bugs. I think I could find my way in it.
Just like I’m not a desert girl, I’m not a rock girl either. I don’t think in terms of dry. As an artist it’s always good to stretch past what you know how to do.
For the longest time, I’ve cut rocks out of hand dye, and been satisfied with them. But I really wanted to do a waterfall with carp. And you can’t have a waterfall without somewhere from the water to fall from. That would be rocks.
I put up some cut grey and brown rocks and looked at them. They looked hopelessly childish and wrong.
It’s a bad moment. It’s also a great invitation. You dig deep, you look at it in different ways, and try to morph what you already know into what you need to do next.
That sent me spinning off to my library to look at how other people handle rocks. I have a book of Elizabeth Doolittle that’s full of great mountain imagery. And a great book on Glacier National Park with some fabulous waterfalls.
The real treasure was my Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, the classic sumi painting text. It said that trees were all about the veins in the leaves, but that rocks were about the grain in the rocks.
I thought about that for a while. Then I realized, the occlusions in the hand dye are the grains in the rock.
I replanned the rocks for the waterfall. Instead of making strips of rocks, I cut chunks. I filled in areas with smaller rocks and gravel.
Then I texturized the rocks, putting on a dark under edge and shading at the bottom third, and followed the patterns of the hand dye as grain. I used black thread and a zigzag stitch to establish the bottom of the rock and then shaded with a long-short stitch. Finally I followed the grain of the rock using the elements of the hand dye. Since I did a lot of stitching, I made them separate from the piece on stitch and tear and felt as stabilizers.
I’m still unsure. But I’m closer. I need to make the rocks that define the pond underneath and sort out the waterfall, but I think it’s on its way.
These rocks need to be less regular. I tried to use perspective to determine the shading, but simple shading seemed to work better.
It’s a slower process. I’m stymied on the desert quilt while I’m waiting for the books I ordered to figure out sand textures. It’s not just sewing, it’s thinking.
What do you think? Are these rocks over-fussy, or do they add the right amount of texture.?
Remember when I said I needed to calm down the mockingbird quilt I’ve been working on? The background was pretty wild. I don’t quite know what to do with deserts. so I don’t know when I’ve gone over the top.
But I do know how to put out a visual firestorm. You go for the complementary color. The eye gets excited by all that contrast, but it cools off all that flaming color blaze.
With all that red, the complement is green. Which means cactus.
I’m not a cactus person. I’m not a desert person. So I’ve spent a week looking at pictures and identifying how I want to make cactus. It’s all about the texture, so it’s all about the stitchery, which means it’s all about the angle of the stitch.
We’ve talked about stitch angles a lot. The Thread Magic Stitch Vocabulary Book has an explanation of that you might find helpful. Moving straight through the machine gets us a hard thick line. Moving out from side to side creates shading. Moving through with an angle gets us a curved line. Here is a link to the blog about Zigzag Stitching.
Straight stitching in spirals creates textures on paddle cactus. The outside is shaded with an outline on the angle, stitching side to side to shade, and some straight-through smoothing.
I used a spikey shading headed upwards to give the feel of rough texture, and used straight stitch for the spines.
Quilts sometimes get designed in a twisty weird way. I think it’s fun to share that with you sometimes.
I’ve been working on a mockingbird quilt for a while. I found an image that intrigued me and drew it up. And I embroidered that.
All that said, where do you put a mocking bird? I had to look it up. This particular mocking bird was from the desert part of the Galapagos Islands. I didn’t know. And from the desert part.
You may have noticed I don’t do desert. Not personally. Just too hot and dry. And not often in my art. But here’s this mockingbird and she needs a desert.
After a fair amount of reading, I found mockingbirds sitting among cactus. But what tickeled me sideways, is that the cactus had owls living in them. The owls were easy.
So how do you make a hole for an owl in a cactus?
We’re pretty far off my map and this point. I don’t do cactus. I don’t do desert. And I need to do holes in desert cactus.
The cactus don’t just have holes in them. They have a scarred area around the hole where the owls dug their holes. The also need a dark background behind that and a place to slip in the owl heads.
Fjrst, I cut cactus bits. I cut a hole in the side of the cactus, and cut an irregular rim around it that I extended past the edge, clipped, and glued around the hole.
Then I put a dark hand dyed lining. in the hole.
The owl head slides right in
What happens next? A lot of stitching on cactus, and some thinking about what you do with a background this bright.
It’s always nice to find a new use for an old tool. I’ve loved oil paint sticks for years. I use them for fabric rubbings and find them an exciting way to design.
I’d pulled some out for a friend who had come to the studio for a visit. They were still on my table, and as I went to put them away, I thought about lace and organza.
painted organza
I’ve painted lace before. Almost all the lace I’ve worked with has been polyester or nylon, so you had to paint it with acrylic paint, the kind that comes in little bottles at Joann’s and Walmart. You mix the paint with water and with fiber medium. Then you can paint it with sponge brushes. The effect is a soft spread of colors with a kind of plastic-like hand, that you can iron, and iron on things.
It’s pretty. But it’s always pastel. You know how I feel about pastels. Yes, there’s a reason for them. I still have to be talked into it.
So I thought about a white piece of lace I bought a while back at a garage sale, and painted bits of it with oil paint stick.
Tips for Working with Oil Paint Stick
Use a sheet of freezer paper to protect your table,.
Peel off the skin on the paint stick with a potato peeler.
Peeling along the long side of the paint stick gives a wider brush stroke.
They can be rubbed against a surface and blended with each other.
The differences are stunning. Both are cool, but in very different ways.
Oil Paint Stick
Has incredible bright color
Won’t spill
Uses up quite a bit of paint for one piece
Takes time to dry
Doesn’t need brushes
Cleans up with Goop or Go Jo
Only paints on one sided
Sets with a hot iron
Acrylic Painted Lace
Paints up with sponge brushes
Drip dries within a couple hours.
Sets with a hot iron.
Pastel to moderate color
Will I use them both. Of course! I love using sheers, and colored sheers give me a way to shift the color of my quilt surface. Having a bright option instead of just a pastel one is a big present under the tree.
Hand dye with oil paint stick lace overlay
I’m working on an ibis that needs a small pond from above and some clouds. New shaded grey/blue/beige laces might be what that needs. I love new toys!
