Embroidered Collage

I did these four of these little bits for a swap over at the Experimental Acrylics yahoo group. 

I started out by laying in a background of purple, blue, and white on a 9x12 piece of canvas paper with a brush, then dabbed my fingers on the piece, picking up and spreading around the color from the portions still wet.  I imagined four different vessels, which I painted in with white before adding color on top.  I did better on making some 3-d than others.  Sometimes the brush would get away from and I'd lose my line, which didn't help.  I scrubbed some additional white over the background around the vessels intending to make them stand out more by making the background less interesting, which seemed to work.  I added a little greyed out green to the interior and then made a touch of shadow.

My last minute thought was to add the strong green lines echoing the shapes of the vessels and that really made the images for me.  I like the contrast of the representational to the almost symbolic abstraction.  It also provided a nice piece of visual balance. 

I could do better if I repeated the exercise, I'm sure, but this was a good experiment for the swap.  It would be interesting to take a real vessel and a little more time and paint the main image rather flatter and more carefully realistic, then streak that green across it.  I wonder if it would be too much contrast then.  Or what if I did the table and vessel in cut papers, with a little paint for the shadow, then did the abstract line in stitch.  That would likely satisfy more fully my sense of what my work should be, making it mine instead of only something that I did.