textile art

What the Flock?: Textures for Very Brown Birds

| ellenanneeddy

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!

Repetition: The Nervous Person’s Friend

| ellenanneeddy

There’s a lot of repetition in any form of art. There’s that moment of ignition, those moments of planning, and pretty soon, you come down to those hours of creation. And they’re full of repetition. Small tasks over and over.

If it sounds like purgatory of a sort, it is. It’s infinately better than the hell of an overactive imagination on a bad day. Repetitious art has saved my life more than once.

Part of it is that repetitious actions put us in a different mode and zone. It’s been called right brain thinking, but I think it needs the reinforcement of physical action, particularly action that doesn’t take a lot of thought.

It may be borking but like everything there is an upside. Art is about need. Need to express yourself, need to fill up space, need for stimulation all turns itself into artwork, given the right emphasis. How would I know? What do you think?’

I’ve kind of had a tough couple of months, but it’s been mostly about friends. We’re all in that just-turned-70 club. Paul Simon was right. “How terribly strange to be seventy.” It is. All of a sudden there are serious things wrong with all of us.v All of a sudden we’re old.

There’s nothing to be done about it. Time doesn’t stop. The warantee runs out. We’re all there, in a way. All we can do is to refuse to run away from each other, no matter how bad it gets.

I’m trying to figure out what I do with this. If you’re one of the people I’m talking about, you can know this. I won’t run and I won’t hide. We’re in this together.

Thank God for repetition. For mindless tasks that eventually build art. They also bring quiet, piece, peace and courage.

On the other side, enough blue, purple, orange and yellow is an excellent color therapy. Color really is an antidepressant.

Right Up to the Edge: Edging with Progressive Color

| ellenanneeddy

We’ve talked alot about progressive color. Any image with a flat color scheme is going to be just that. Flat. Shading creates a top and a bottom, a sense of where something is in space and dimensionality. There are a million ways to shade. Shading is about value. it’s also about creating a dimensional image. Shading makes things round. Which helps them look real, even if the color is a bit wonky. But it can be managed many ways. Here are some of the ways I build color schemes.

as a series of the same color

a base color with a shocker and shader, say, orange. warm yellow, yellow. cool yellow, with purple and green (see Shockers and Shaders)

as a undershading with a dark color and creating a layer of complementary over stitching (Under the Skin: Thoughts about Shading)

as colors zoned next to each other.

Almost always, I’m using progressive color. You can see the colors line up from dark to light to create shadows and space.

We’ve also talked about over stitching, edge stitching. I usually do a final stitch over in black, just to clean up the edge from rough stitching. See Hard Edge Applique: Defining the Line.

These birds are by their nature outlined, feather by feather. Not just with black but a bright outline as well.’

One of the basic color rules is that your background defines the light of the piece. If tyour images are in an orange light, then the outlines are orange. So I shaded the outlines as well as the basic shaded background. Do I have that many shades of orange thread? Of course I do!

Shading the orange outline as well as the birds helps establish their round plump little selves.

Next week I’ll share what happened when I tried to do a reflexion of the birds in their pond.

At the Turn of a Head: How little Details Create the Visual Path

| ellenanneeddy
Before owls

I’ve been working on this quilt for some while, and it’s gone through several transformations. We had a mocking bird in here which is now slated for a later flight, somewhere else. And we’ve added lizards and subtracted lizards. All the way through, it’s been a stumbly path.

But each quilt needs to build a path for your eye. It’s more obvious with elongated quilts, but if you want movement in your work, you need to help the eye move.

What makes your eye move? Usually the small things: rocks, bugs, a strand of yarn over the piece, leaves. In this case, it’s bugs and owls. What makes the owls seem to move? The turn of their heads. What makes the owls heads move? What they’re looking at, of course.

It helps that the owls are darling. I’ve been in love with them since I stitched them in. But I found the path of the whole piece depended on what they were looking at.

It’s not an exact science, but we look where the owls are looking. It all turns on the turn of the heads.

I’ve talked a lot about the visual path. You can find more information about it on the new web page: It’s the Little Things: Building the Visual Path.

We have it all embroidered and stitched down now. Next stop: backing and binding.

AI Ick: How Do We Handle the AI Conundrum

| ellenanneeddy

Let’s start this by saying, it’s just one woman’s opinion. I mean no disrespect to anyone.

It’s been a tough couple of weeks. Two weeks ago I had to change web hosts. It was an ungodly mess and I did almost nothing except try to fix it. I wrote that the dog had eaten my homework which is why I didn’t have a new blog up.

This week I can almost honestly say that dinosaurs broke into my computer room, pooped in my computer, packaged me up in a box and sent me to California where I kept hearing a cat near by. That bad.

We got it straightened out. It’s three weeks of my life I’ll never get back, so I am deeply grateful for the guy at FixRunner who found me an answer within an hour.

And I don’t have much work to show. So I thought I’d talk about something a lot of us are finding distressing.

I have some problems with AI. I have not, in fairness, tried it. I may never. It offends me in a baseline way. But that’s not the real reason. I think perfectified art really misses the point.

There’s no getting around the fact that it’s theft. I wish that were new. One cave man copied another woman’s art they found in a cave 3 miles up the road. Art has always been derivative. We learn art skills by copying other people’s work. It’s how you learn art in college, largely. You copy the masters, not because your copy has value, but so that you can build your skills for your own work.

We are still always influenced. If I see a quilt with a heron, and I make a heron quilt, it will have a lot of things in common. Like the heron. And the water. I can’t tell you how many heron quilts I’ve seen over years that mimicked Lady Blue. It’s a compliment, I think. Or it may have nothing to do with anything except their interest in beautiful birds. I’ll never know.

That’s the benign kind of theft. We influence eachother with what we do. Art speaks to art. We respond to other people’s work by working with either their imagery or their materials. If we’re good, it’s enough ours that no one notices.

It’s usually hopeless to ask someone why they copied you. They’ll either say they didn’t beause they don’t recognize that they did, or they’ll tell you it’s all completely originally theirs. Either way, it’s not a worthy conversation. Nor is it strictly the truth. But strict truth is a bad fitting shoe. It hurts more than it helps sometime.

The real thieves are the ones who want to use your design commercially. I had someone offer my quilt, Dancing in the Light as a fleecy blanket you could own for $90. When I was over being furious, I realized none of the blankets they offered were produced. It was strict sham. I was torn between being appalled and wanting one. I told them not to do that in an official manner and they stopped listing my piece. I don’t think they stopped. It appears to be a Chinese thing. I found a number of listings on Temu and Etsy.

Part of this is a change in technology. There’s technology out there that we have the ability to use, and no sense about why you shouldn’t. We have the technology to make those blankets. Had they paid me millions of dollars for that blanket’s rights, I might have gone on to join Van Gogh and Degas in the world where people print your work on blankets. We all have our weaknesses.

But technology breaks down all kinds of limits. I can see that cave woman wishing for a world where she didn’t have to paint with her fingers. Imagine her joy when she realized that she could apply paint by blowing through a tube. Or by using a brush.

When I started quilting in the seventies, it was quickly clear that I was wretched at hand quilting. I started to quilt by machine. I would have people come up to my piece, sometimes touch it and say, “Oh, that’s just machined.” It was. Unabashedly. The technology allowed me to do something more than was possible before. Both Harriet Hardgrave and Caryl Bryer Fallert changed the quilt world with magificent machine quilting. It took us a while to accept that different technologies give us different possibilities. I still have people who somehow think what I do is computer generated. I disillusion them when I can. One color at a time, one thread per layer of stitching. Don’t tell me it’s not art.

I somehow hear that when I hear someone say, that’s just AI. It’s an interesting technique that may lead to all kinds of things.

The real reason I dislike the idea of AI is that it tends towards perfection. A perfect picture plucked from someone elses work. At some time, I suspect we’ll have an upstanding collection of AI work set up legally to use, like clip art. I suspect it will look very much like that.

I have a deep fondness for oriental art. I like the aesthetics. This come from the Impressionists who embraced Japanese art. Chinese art tends to be perfect. Japanese art celebrates imperfections. I am much more moved by the imperfections of art, than sleek perfection. People are not perfect. Perfect art doesn’t show the value of of our humanity. I don’t think AI has a way to offer us that.

component Quilting: Planning Ahead for the Small Stuff

| ellenanneeddy

What do these two quilts have in common? Not that much. They’re a different shape. They’re a different color space. They’re a different time of day. They’re clearly both heavily embroidered and oil paint rubbed. But other than that?

They both needed small elements to guide the visual path within. I made all the bugs for White Garden. But I didn’t need them all. The others went into Fire Flies.

Large embroideries take time. I draw them, look at them with some scruteny and eventually embroider them after I’m sure they’re right. It takes time. And effort. Usually a larger embroidery takes about a week to a month. They are a long term investment in time and energy.

If I’ve drawn them well, they should have energy and movement within them. But a good moving image needs to be placed in motion. One easy way to create movement is by the stepping stones of smaller elements. I often use rocks, bugs, butterflies, frogs, flowers and other natural images to help direct that path.

So it stands to reason, I need a lot of those. I do make batches of them for specific projects. But I always make way more than that one project needs. I used to stitch them directly into the quilt. I’ve changed to stitching them separately because it allows me much more flexability.

Why? It’s time effective. I don’t need to set up the thread, redraw the cartoons, and go through just enough flowers or bugs. A batch of them, with leftovers is as good as extra waffles the day after you made them. It’s just smart.

It’s also fun to sit down to a sheet full of little fish or flowers. It’s a lovely 2 day project, usually.

Do I have a collection of these things? You betcha. But they go away fast. There’s always another quilt that needs a trail of bugs.

building a Background

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve spent the last week working on this lizard. He’s ready now for a home.

That’s not as easy as it sounds. Ive done a series of these lizard pieces. They’re based on stone floors and wild things growing through the cracks.

I have a collection of ceiling tiles I use for larger rubbing plates. But I felt a need for something new. So I headed to Lowes in search of texture.

I’m very excited by this rock panel. It’s on a mesh, and perfect for oil paint stick rubbing. But I tried some other things as well

I’m not sure I’m there yet. But I’m working on building the right home.

Rethinking Rocks

| ellenanneeddy

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.

The post, Good Bones:Rocks from Water, covers how I’ve usually done rocks.

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.?

Next week, adding the waterfalls and koi.

Building Holes: New Constructs for Something Different

| ellenanneeddy

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.