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
A couple of weeks ago, I did a series of small rubbing pieces. I use rubbing plates and oil paint stick. I focused on different backgrounds, flowers, bees, dragonflies and butterflies. It’s an endless river of design choices in a tiny scale.
I’ve loved working with tiny pieces. It’s nice to have a quick result, and they’ve proved to be popular. Who wouldn’t want a delightful piece of art that fits everywhere and doesn’t cost much.
The rubbing plates I’ve been using are a limit of sorts. I still haven’t figured out how to make my own. I will. I want it bad enough, I’ll do it.
But I’ve enjoyed working with these flower plates to stretch what they might be.
But there’s another side. It’s soothing to spend a couple days just stitching. The rhythm of the machine, the movement of design, and the feeling of watch thread flow from the needle to the fabric all create a tao that’s gotten me through endless tough times. Demanding focus to actually color in the lines is very good for me. A lot of my stitching can be mindless. This is not. I have to try to hit the line.
I’m going to show you some of these before and after I’ve stitched them. It’s a magical change that always thrills me.
They are transformed by stitching. They’re lovely, just as fabric rubbings but they change in amazing ways, once they’ve been stitched.
These are supposed to be waterlilies. But with some background and color changes, I think they make fine Dahlias.
These are supposed to be forget me nots.
But I love them as carnations
But there’s another side. It’s a place to explore and work with colors differently and stitches differently. Not endless change, but small differences not tried before. Is there anything I haven’t tried. Of course there is. Move it over a quarter of an inch and add peach, and I’ll bet I’ve never done it before.
I’ll be finishing these little quilts in a day or two, and they’ll go up on the website and onto Etsy for sale. You’ll find tutorials on rubbings and stitching on the video page.
Take time to try things out in little ways or big ones, as your work needs. It feels great to stretch a bit.
No. I did not misspell that. All art, all creative process is a journey where we ask questions about design, color, shape, materials and techniques. Each piece we do is an answer for the question. Do I make a big moon or a small one? Out of Angelina Fiber? Or tulle? Or that strange gold brocade I just brought home? Do I make rays? Or a big circle, or spirals woven into each.
How do you do the black and white parts of a ladybug? Bobbin work again, but showing different directions.
Put them all together and they make a series. Series work helps us answer a billion and one questions.
There are no right or wrong answers. But each quilt gives you other questions to try. And since experience is the best teach, each quilt is a new experience, even if you will never do it again. Try a new thread. Will it work from the top or shall I put it in the bobbin? This machine likes this kind of poly monofilament. Will it work better with a cone holder? Horizontal or vertical? Endless questions that can only be answered by an endless dance of doing.
But the other reason is fascination. We regularly explore bits of the world that fascinate us. I’m fascinated by bugs of all kinds, but in red? Red? Where’s the red?
Well of course, I now have a reason to explore all those reds together. What if she isn’t really red?
Do I find repetition boring? NO! I find repetition changes everything as we put together the puzzle of each piece
So, if there’s something I don’t know the answer to, I sit down with a pile of new work that just might give me the answer. I’m not repeating myself? I’m on a journey. Who knows what I’ll find.
i had an uncle named Sol who was a born failure and nearly everybody said he should have gone into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle
Sol indulged in that possibly most inexcusable of all to use a highfalootin phrase luxuries that is or to wit farming and be it needlessly added
my Uncle Sol’s farm failed because the chickens ate the vegetables so my Uncle Sol had a chicken farm till the skunks ate the chickens when
my Uncle Sol had a skunk farm but the skunks caught cold and died and so my Uncle Sol imitated the skunks in a subtle manner
or by drowning himself in the watertank but somebody who’d given my Uncle Sol a Victor Victrola and records while he lived presented to him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a scruptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and i remember we all cried like the Missouri when my Uncle Sol’s coffin lurched because somebody pressed a button (and down went my Uncle Sol and started a worm farm)
e.e.cummings
I’ve always thought of my creatures as being alive. Not in the sense of breath or heartbeat, but in having a purpose and a place of their own. They go places I can’t go. They do things for others I can’t do. They will live past me. I know I don’t control them, not even in the process of making them. They come from me, but I know they have lives of their own.
I also see them as beautiful. If it’s a beauty that scares me, that’s ok. I want to make them beautiful in what they are.
So when I make a piece, I build them the best world I can. Something that reflects their beauty in their place. And I always try to give them what they need. Along with the beauty of water and sky, earth and rock, I always supply lunch.
I’m a bit out of my depth when I do something like a flock of guinea hens. I see my birds, frogs, and bugs as splendiferous creatures with their own beauty. Barnyard stuff, not so much. But the point is to see something’s beauty in their space. So I provided the things I though would improve the barnyard esthetic. I added hollyhocks, ladybugs. and worms.
I’ve never done worms before much. But I wanted worms for my hens for several reasons. For one thing, they’re funny. I didn’t want cute worms with eyes. But these guinea hens remind me of the ladies at coffee hour after church. They are, by nature, silly. So the worm joke is practically implied.
I’d also noticed that the guinea hens, past their spots and funny hats are basically chickens with bad manners. They do like worms.
I also wanted a horizontal line feature that carried the eye in places across the canvas. Worms did that.
There was a small problem. The piece is purply brown. How do you make worms show up?
We ended up with some creative color choices.
I started with a medium brown, a red purple and then went into magenta, rust red, salmon pink, and a dusty rose for the highlights. The salmon pink looked way out of line when I put did that row. But the dusty pink settled it down to a proper worm color.
So now the guinea hens have their own buffet. Perfect for the after-church crowd. What a can of worms!
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!
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.
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)
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.
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.
