Embroidered Collage

If you look at the yellow strip you'll see it's actually white and yellow with printed circles.  The paper pieces are part of a packet of collage papers that I purchased from Marissa Lee, an artist who creates monoprints from layering wood block relief prints.  They were the inspiration for this piece and you'll be seeing other bits in the future as parts of landscapes and portals and maybe something else.

I started with laying out a strip the small rectangles and looking through my paper stash.  The dark blue and medium green papers really made the yellow pop.  After collaging that portion, I wanted to pull the circles out into the overall composition and unify it a bit further.  So, I drew in circles with watercolor crayons in a couple shades and painted them over with acrylic medium.

I knew I needed to take the piece a little further.  Since I'd been thinking about themes recently I decided to push the similarity to a landscape.  I used stitching to add the sun, at first intending to only do the outer circle, but then realized it needed a little more emphasis.  I added the waving lines of buttonhole stitch in the field and the sky for balance and interest.

The idea that the first gleam of sun would be so bright and so wide and the rest of the sky still so dark is not anything I've ever seen in reality, certainly, but it's somehow believable as an exagerration here, because of the abstraction.  I've seen examples in art books of how far abstracts can go and still FEEL like landscapes and the opportunities for playing around are extensive.