More work in process

Sometimes,  I get asked why I have a sketchbook, when my work is about textiles, but really, my sketchbooks (of which I have many) are great inspirations for my textile work.
Today's piece of work is directly inspired by some pictures in one of my books.

These two oil pastel sketches inspired me to try some simple landscapes in fabric, which, if you know me, is something I do a lot of.  My idea was to paint the sky and the foreground, then use fabrics to create the horizon in a dimensional manner, ie using scrunched and folded fabric.

So far, all I have done is paint the skies.  I am using canvas for these and using the long format to fit a pair of frames I have.  I am still dithering about whether to paint the foregrounds, or whether to use fabric.  Perhaps I should do both?

Also, here is another of the collage a day foundations I have added to.

As you can see, I have made it to fit a particular frame as well.  What inspired this was the tiny piece of metallic sari border fabric.  In fact, this is all I have, a scrap, but I wanted to use it as it is sooo shiny.
On the right are black linen and satin pieces and the Grey square is a painted baby wipe.  I free motioned the moth onto a piece of filmy gold organza, which is only just visible and if you look carefully, you can see I have not trimmed it right back to the stitching yet.  I am quite pleased with this one and am itching to get on with some hand stitching on it!

Happy Creating!

T for transparent tuesday

I nearly forgot T for Tuesday over at Elizabeth's blog.

In fact, my rather elegant cup of tea here is after a hard day at the sewing machine!
I was working with transparent chiffons to make a vignette landscape (vignette, just means not edged or fading out at the edges)

It was an idea I thought of yesterday whilst driving down the mountain.
This is what I got done today.  I am quite pleased with it, although I went overboard with the stitching in a few places.  If you click on it it should enlarge.  The flowers are called Wahlenbergia or Australian Bluebell and I thought they suited the landscape.
This is noly a sample for a larger piece, but I learned something - don't use white felt!  No matter how clean your hands are, it tends to get grubby.  I think next time I will try canvas, because it can be wiped clean and mounted on stretcher bars.
Anyway, that was my day.

Happy creating!

Transparent landscape

some of you know i am doing two art courses at present, and sometimes thing gell together to create an idea.  I had been looking at a lot of landscapes for one course and the other night I was reading Ruth Isset's new book 'A Passion for Colour' I was very interested in her leaf collages, since that is something I love, but  she was discussing using transparent fabrics ans I thought, perhaps this would transfer to a landscape!  I needed to do some sketches and coloured paper collages for Elizabeth Barton's course, so...

these were the sketches i came up with.

I repeated this as a watercolour sketch, which even though it is transparent, did not give the effect that I wanted.

I repeated it again with coloured and painted tissue and this gave me lots of overlapping colours which is what I wanted.
This morning I rummage through all my sheers and put together a fabric sample.

And this is what I came up with.  At present, I am tacking all the pieces down with silk thread, then I will be adding lots more stitch, to merge the colours into each other.  I will probably be adding more sheers, especially in the mid ground and doing a fair bit of free motion and some needlefelting, but I am happy where this one is going.  In real life, the overlapping sheers are really vibrant and much greener than they appear here.  Every time I look at it I just get itchy fingers and want to do more stitching!
But of course it is time to cook, or we will starve to death lol!

Happy creating!

what we saw at art class

As soon as I am finished posting, I will be going to my needlefelting machine to get to work on my Tangled Textiles piece hat is due in under a week.  I have been so busy it has slipped by!
I have been working on the landscapes I started, for Elizabeth Barton's course.  They are all very simple, but Today, whilst I was supervising my students I had a play with coloured skies

Here are a few more I have been working on.

This format is inspired by the work of Gilda baron, who is an extremely talented fibre artist.  I know I could do something a bit less 'pretty' but these are what is inspiring me at the moment. I am actually itching to transfer them to fabric and embroidery!
Also at art class we had a little visitor - a bogong moth, looking very bedraggled

and here is something one of my students is playing with.  I have introduced her to textured acrylic and she is hooked.  But I am glad she is learning to play around.  She is quite a talented watercolourist, but she gets very locked into perfection and doesn't like her work.  We are all guilty of that, aren't we?

This will probably be just a background, but I love the texture she has put on it.  I think it will probably be floral.  We will see where this one takes her!

Happy Creating!

Back again

After our little fright yesterday,  all is safe.  Luckily the weather yesterday was not as extreme as it is today.  It is very hot with a hot wind.  Autumn is still a few weeks away yet, I expect.  The CFA are still working, but it is all under control.  At this time of year, it takes weeks sometimes for fires actually to be extinguished properly,  but we are safe although watchful of course.  Thank you all for your thoughts.

Obviously I did not get around to doing digital drawing this week, but I will get back on the wagon next sunday

Anyway,  I told you I had been bogged down with homework, and my little break each day has been to watch Julie Fei fan Balzer's Webcasts,  which you can see recordings of here.
It was a great series and I loved it.  And as I was thinking about it this morning, I had one of those aha! moments.
In one of the courses,  I had been thinking a lot about landscape and last night whilst I was watching fire watch warnings,  I sketched quite a number of landscape thumbnails.

Here are a few.  I did pages and pages.  I wanted to see what different compositions I could come up with.
Whilst I was watching Julie this morning,  it occurred to me that I could make some little stencils to make little prints of these.  So I did.
Here are some of the images I got.

At this stage I have only got basic landscapes, but later I will add trees and grass and flowers etc in the foreground, but I had to stop because the paint was drying before I could get it on the page.  Too hot!

Here are some more

At least they will be dry when I get back to them, no worries about that!

I did forget to take photos.  You know you get going and everything flies out the window,  but basically here are a few of the shapes of the stencils I created

These are the basic frame shapes I was interested in.  Well used now, as you can see.

Because I was using an altered book backgrounds already slapped on,  I started by stenciling the frame shapes in gesso

Then I   put in some sky with blue paint at different heights and levels  and when that was dry I used some of 

The stencils above to put in the horizon.  I did make a cloud stencil, but I didn't actually like it, so I put clouds in by hand with a bit of gesso.  Lastly,  I put in a green foreground.  

 I also made these - trees and rocks and a few little flowers I cut with a die cutter.  

This will be the next step, to add the foreground elements.  I didn't make grass shapes or bush shapes, because I think it will be easier to put them in with a brush.

I was quite pleased with this result and think it will be a useful tool in my course,  and also in the workshop I will be attending at the Quilt convention next month.

Although I have done landscapes in paint and fabric for many years,  I have never studied the compositions and elements as closely as this and these little stencils will help me create lots and lots of different ideas for new work,  and in a simple and pleasing way, because keeping it simple is the best way,  but you will have to agree,  these are much more interesting than the sketches and are more likely to inspire me!

Happy creating!

A bit of needlefelting

I have had a bit of a play around with some sari silk thread which I had lying around
I dyed some bits and pieces with ink.

here a some of the bits.  It is very lustrous and shiny and yummy
I did one of my collage a day foundations with it.

You can see it would be wonderful for landscapes, so I made a few little ones.

This one is a very simple one, but what I love is the white bits at the top that look a bit like clouds and the way I have frayed the bits at the bottom and they look like grass.

In this one I have again used the little white patches as clouds and all the leafy bits at the bottom are just my offcuts from the others.

This one is my favourite and I know I will be stitching on it very soon.  I even used some little threads of the sari silk, to make a few reeds.

Happy creating!

Another leaf and some painting

today's ATC is another leaf!!
Felt, Wire, Silver thread, green stranded cotton, running stitch, couching, chain stitch.

I was looking at  the colouricious site in response to their newsletter, and found a gorgeous landscape by Ineke Berlin.    This one is also gorgeous, too.' 

Ineke uses Lutradur for her landscapes and because it is a non woven fabric, there are no fraying problems.  I thought I would have a go at it.  I have lutradur, but I looked around to see what other nonwovens I had.

I found some nappy lines, some face wipes and baby wipes and for good measure, I added some tea bag paper.

Since they were all very thin, I layered them up, so that ant paint going through would go onto the fabric below, and I decided to use the kids paint brushes I bought the other day. (Instead of throwing out the paint - nothing goes to waste around here!)

Here is a baby wipe painted.  I was using primary colours, nothing very nature like about that, but I will show you how I changed the contrast and colours in a bit.

Tea bag paper - very translucent and yummy!

and some nappy liner - you can see here the colours are much more natural and the contrast is more blended in.  I did this by doing something I often do when painting fabrics for landscape.  I roll the fabric together to blend the paints.  In these two above, I rolled the fabric into a sausage and then rolled it between my hands.  In other samples, I scrunch and roll into a ball and roll between my hand, and this gives a more blotchy pattern rather than the streaks you see here.

My group of tea bag papers.  Because these were so see through, I didn't blend the colours by scrunching.)

Here are some of the face wipes and baby wipes.  you can see the bottom right, green one was scrunched rather than rolled.

More baby wipes and some nappy liners.  The two nappy liners at the bottom show clearly the difference between rolling and scrunching with these very thin materials,

All in all, a very successful session.  Now, I need to do a bit of work on my sketch of the creek, which is what I want to use this for.  and start cutting ripping, arranging and sewing.  Hopefully, I'll have something to show by next week, although I still have one deadline today week to get done!  (It will be down to the wire as usual for me)

An ATC a day keeps the world at bay!
Go see lisa's ATC

Snow gum bark

Sorry about yesterday, folks, the hubby came home from town with a nasty cough and headache, so I didn't get onto the net, but today has been a great day for creating!
I have been wanting to have a go at screen printing for a while and I decided today was just the day.  I need some fabric for the bark on my snow gums in the landscape I am working on.

Remember this sketch?  At present I am working on the leafy layer, but will be needing some tree bark soon.

Here's my stylised sketch of some snow gum bark.  It's very bright, isn't it?  But for anyone out there who has never seen a snow gum, here, here and here are a few links that will show you that my sketch is actually a little subdued.

I am not using a store bought screen, just a piece of organza stretched on a frame, then covered around the edges with duct tape.  It worked really well for me. Kerr Grabowski, in Adventures in surface design, said it works ok for most things.
Here are my home made bits and pieces on my table wich has been lined with some old fabric..

The printing boards are made from polystyrene sheets cut from a box, with batting and fabric added on top.

 I started out by laying a paper stencil down, and pulling some yellow and brown down it.

The result was interesting, but not quite what I wanted, but I could see some interesting streaks where the colours went together.  (You will notice I am just using some scrap floral fabric), so I got rid of the stencil and went with lots of colours.

I think my textile paint really needed to be thinned a bit, as I had trouble getting it on as you can see.

But this was the result and I was really pleased with the textures created by the different colours streaking.
I made two of these (actually four, because the fabric was two screens long) and here are the final results

I was really quite pleased with these, and went on to make two more slightly different ones

This one had a colour range that is totally over the top, but I loved it and the streaky texture.

This one was more in keeping with my colour range for my tree, but a little toned down for the less bright parts of the tree.
The next thing I wanted to try was using pastels.

 On this piece of fabric, I screened with the leftover paint from my waste (just because I liked the browny colour of it) and then put a texture plate underneath the fabric (simply made by drawing lines with hot glue on cardboard)

The lines that came up are from drawing a square pastel over the texture plate.  I can see with a bit more fiddling, this technique might be useful for making lines.  Next time, I will try it with string glued to the card to get more consistent lines.

 The next thing I tried was drawing with the pastels on the screen.  Above is a screen with lines drawn in pastel,  It transferred well, when I squeegeed some extender across it, but I couldn't help but get my fingers dirty.  As the fabric was wet, I just hoed in and added more pastel by hand.

After this I dispensed with the screen and did some playing around with pastels.

Here are two long skinny bits of fabric ironed onto freezer paper and then drawn on with pastels.

Then I just painted over them with diluted textile medium and a great big brush. Now that the fabric was wet, it fell off the freezer paper and needed to be pinned, but I found that the pastel really went on well, so I added some more.

This reminded me of when we were at kindergarten and we used those hard faber-castel chalks on wet cartridge paper, so...

I just wet some newspaper and had a go...and I really liked it.  When the paper is wet, the pastel goes on quite thick and some colours are a little opaque (black and white), whilst others (bright red) are a little transparent.

The newspaper was very thin and fragile, but I liked the semi transparent texture.  I think I might have to try this out with my next batch of fabric paper.

So all in all, It was a very productive day. I do find, that when I play around like this I am more likely to find things I like and will use again.  Serendipity.

There's a lot more experimenting I need to do with the screen, but also with the wet fabric and dry media.  I wonder if......