Embroidered Collage

I had thought my next step was going to involve stitching, and it did, but only a very little before I got sidetracked.

  I mounted the canvas onto the 16" thinner stretcher bars that I had purchased, using tacks from my needlepoint days, to get the stiffness in the canvas that I had been missing when I did Kite-Flying.  The mounting made it much easier to add the black blob of fabric to the focal area.  I looked at the piece thinking about the next stitches and realized that it looked so, well, simple.  There was variation where the patterned fabric had been added, but nowhere else, and the fabric variation was on such a small scale.

So I pulled out my colored pencils and began adding swirls.  At first I only added green into the green and black into the black, but then I pulled out the actual Jasper disk and realized that the colors folded into each other, so I started putting some darker colors in the green and some lighter colors in the black.  Then I reached for a red-purple color and, with a little bit of fear, drew my first squiggle.  It didn't dominate and the dose of complimentary color did add a bit of livliness, as I had hoped.  I pulled out the watercolor crayons next and added a bit of green and black with these as well, knowing that they would smear when covered them with matte varnish.  It turned out nicely.  I had applied just enough color that the smearing modified the surface instead of completely covering all I had done before.

I also cut the Peltex shape for the green portion of the focal point, covered it with a satin, and added the piece of jasper that I had based this design on.  It's not sewn onto the canvas yet, only placed there for the photo.  Now I am ready to stitch.

Previous Posts:  Part 1 - Sketching,  Part 2 - Painting