Embroidered Collage

Woohoo!  The Art-o-mat at the Doylestown library has been cycled out from when I first blogged about finding it last year.  The current machine has some nifty gears and shiny bits in with the robot that don't show up well in the photograph.

Of course, I had to buy a bit of art.  I chose a mini art quilt by Nikki Wheeler and a collage by Rachel Freeman.  Both are nice pieces and I'll store them with my atcs.  As a bonus, Rachel's collage has a neat paper hinge so it will stand up on its own.  I had to jiggle and fuss with the machine to get it to accept the tokens but it was a great deal of fun.

Color again - but this time colored pencil instead of markers.  I love how this medium lays down on the paper of the moleskine sketchbook.  It gives me a lot more room for shading if I want to make the pieces appear more three dimensional than the overlapping does on its own.  The design element of having one circle be squiggly lines instead of smooth also seemed to work well.

I couldn't continue with the color because we were traveling, so I did another divided field, this time varying the size of the circular ripples for each function.  This page took me longer because of the small circles, but I really liked the effect.

A friend who saw the sketchbook at this point liked the page with ovals and circles and suggested I add triangles, too.  So I gave that a try.  I'm not particularly happy with this incarnation.  I think the shapes get lost in the other similarities.  It needs a focal point or difference of some sort.  But that's not the fault of the combination of shapes.

At some point it occurred to me that the ripples looked something like the contours on a map, so I did a page emphasizing the similarity.  I used the smallest pen point I had and deliberately held the pen differently for this one so as to get more irregular lines. 

I was a bit bored and didn't know what to do next, so I gave myself freedom to deviate further from my doodle algorithm.  I drew one curvy line and continued until I had a horn, after a fashion. I confined the usual pattern to one small section, but referenced it with the circles elsewhere.  Not bad, but I think I can do more with the concept.

See the previous three spreads.

  I'm starting another 8x10 piece with a 11x14 canvas background.  This time I began by laying down papers.  I could have developed a collage simply from here, but that's not what I have in mind.  I have a really cool piece of arched lace that I want to be the focus of the finished piece.  The next step is painting and unifying the background so that all of what you see now fades together.

The bird on a branch piece has a name - "Evening Dawns" - to go with its completion.  The muted background and the owlish appearance of the bird inspired the name.  This picture shows accurately where the "cropping" ended up when I took the canvas off the 11"x14" bars and wrapped it around the 8"x10" bars.  I'm very pleased with how it turned out. 

I actually did the last bits a week or so ago, but have been distracted by other things and mulling over what my next canvas piece should be.

See the most recent posts about the bird and the background.

I did go back to patterns for some of these drawings.  I wondered what would happen if I expanded one ring and added designs to it and also what would happen if I divided the field of the drawing, so I tried two of each.

My mind drifted and I tried something intended to be a landscape.  It was okay, but not impressive, so I abstracted and rounded the idea further for the next page.  This is more appealing, but I'm not really happy with it either.

I think I prefer the drawings where I'm more careful and regular with my lines and the thickness of those lines is narrower in proportion to the size of the page.  I'll definitely be returning to the ideas in those first two spreads again.

See the previous three spreads.

Marbled paper sometimes seems to have images in it, so this time I looked for curves that I could turn into a face.  The one bit reminded me of an ear, so I started there.  Because of the way the design went, I figured I would add the nose and such for the profile in pen, then did my cutting and gluing so the face would fit on the 8"x10" watercolor paper.

I wasn't sure how I'd add stitch at first, but when I realized the "ear" didn't look much like one I wanted to emphasize it in some way.  Instead of drawing it out with a line I added jewelry.  To keep the eye moving I put in a headdress jewel as well, then put touches of red at the stitching and at the lips.

I'm still not sure how much I like the piece on its own merits, but I am definitely happy with my progression in the series, since I did something a bit different.