Embroidered Collage

4

Four months since my first of One Hundred Footsteps

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Three years since my first original artist trading cards.

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Two years since my first blog post.

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One happy and thankful artist.

I started out awkwardly and improved with practice.  I have searched my soul and played without thinking.  I have branched out and found focus.  I have thrived within, abandoned, and then returned to the mail art community.  I have kept some things the same and sought out ways to continually improve other things.  I have shared my journey and I am the richer for it.

My traffic has grown three-fold in the last year.  Almost 300 of you subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog and over 3000 unique visitors stop by each month.  In your numbers and in your comments you encourage me.  Thank you for your interest in my endeavors and reading along with me.  I have a found a blog as an online journal to be wonderful tool, whether anyone else sees it or not, but all of you definitely make it a lot more fun.

I still need a better name before I post this to my Studio News blog as an official completion but I didn't want to wait until I came up with one to show the finished piece.  I stayed very minimal with bringing together the pieces and adding stitching.  I really wanted the detail and texture of the pulled thread piece to stand out the most. 

I stitched a piece of the unpainted fabric down, then stitched down the pulled thread portion.  I embroidered a few circles and added a spray of white beads, then stretched the fabric onto the bars.  At the Fiber Alliance meeting it was suggested that maybe a few more beads and a little more emphasis might be good, so I put in a little more beading in ocean colors and strengthened the impression of the embroidered circles with whipping and detached buttonhole.  

I know I could have gone into much greater depth with layering, perhaps used some net fabric in layers to obscure and reveal bubbles or pulled a texture surface off of the pulled thread piece by building up stitches on the canvas, perhaps embroidering on scrim first and combining the two.  Someday I hope to do those things in another project.  But I feel this simpler effect is appropriate for this work.  It pleases me as it is.

I really like the feel of stitching mulberry paper.  It crinkles just a touch and has just a little extra texture.  I enjoy collaging with it also, as it almost melds one piece into another, although I did not do so here.  I didn't do anything new here, just stitched the mulberry paper bits together and attached them to cardstock for a swap.  But it did get me thinking.  How would something like this look on a canvas?  Would I mix sewing and collage then?  Does the hand of the paper change if I paint over it with acrylics first?  I enjoyed the bit of playing and will be mailing these off to trade shortly.

The concept of edges stuck with me after this chapter in Finding Your Visual Voice, although more as a question than an answer.  I'd read about lost and sharp edges and what's in between in regard to realistic painting, but had never thought about the effect that they might have on my mixed media works.  Looking back, I mix them for effect, but now I'll be aware that I'm thinking about it.

Overall I didn't find too much new here, although I asked myself the questions.  Much of this I had worked out already.  I need to do some little bits or the bigger works overwhelm me.  I can do some sketching out ahead of time, but too much and I lose interest in compleing the work.  The questions about painting medium did not really apply.

Of all the parts this was the one most geared to actual painting.  Previously I blogged about other parts of Finding Your Visual Voice, beginning with an overall book review and followed by chapters on Inspiration and Subject Matter and Art Elements and Composition.

I refuse to name it Bubbles, but that is how I have been thinking about this idea since I first had it back in July when I stitched the pulled thread focal point.  I had been hoping to get to it earlier, but lost the stitched piece for awhile.  I was thrilled to find it again and began working on the background.  This post should really have been in three parts, but since I forgot to take in-progress pictures you're getting all the information at once.

I had originally anticipated the background would involve more materials.  I pulled some papers and fabric and started thinking aobut compositions, but ended up paring it down to just using the fabric.  I adhered a square of the fabric to the corner of ungessoed canvas, then painted over the canvas and portions of the fabric in deep, dark oceanic blues and greens.  That part went very well and I was happy.

Then I decided to print over sections of the background with the bubble design from the foam printing plates I had prepared for the hand-decorated papers.  This failed miserably.  The bubbles didn't really show up.  The surface wasn't flat enough for the depth of the indentations in the foam.  I did get a few faint impressions but mostly ended up just marring my surface with lighter colors.  I felt like I had just ruined what I did the previous night. 

Then, I went to clean up and discovered that the paint had gone through the un-gessoed but painted canvas and I had painted my floor!  Happily it is a wood laminate and it was still soon enough that I got everything cleaned up before the acrylic cured up completely.  Overall, though, it was not a good evening.

I still wanted bubbles.  I decided to use my watercolor crayons, but, instead of brushing acrylic medium all over them as I had done in the past, this time I would use a more controlled approach.  I drew in circles in one deep turquoise and then shaded the bubbles in a handful of different colors.  I took a small paintbrush and a puddle of liquid medium and used that instead of water to activate the colors.  It worked wonderfully.  I was able to keep the shading and the circles both that night, and the next, when I coated the whole piece with acrylic medium to seal it.  Using the liquid medium had sealed the watercolor crayon marks enough that they hardly smeared when exposed to liquid again.  My idea worked.  The background looked fantastic.  It's not what I originally imagined, but I absolutely love it.

The Eleventh Door

Regarding the Movement of Water

I continued with two of the basic collages, obscuring and altering sections with acrylic paint in a deliberately loose and abstract fashion, then scraping some white over the completed pieces.  When they dried, I trimmed the 6x8 pieces down to 5x7 and added stitching.

I'm pleased with them, especially The Eleventh Door, but they're a little messy for my taste.  I think I want to be more deliberate when I paint the next pair.  I have no problems with the stitching though.  Using the stranded cotton floss works well as a simple mark and I'm happy with the motifs that I repeated.  I do think I could push the stitching further, even while keeping it flat, but I'm not quite sure how yet.

After I complete all ten of the 5x7 collages I will decide if I want to expand any of them further into 8x10s or even use one on a Footstep, or if I will list them all on Etsy.