Embroidered Collage

Everything went as planned with mounting the gold piece - except that I did the stitching while in the jury lounge waiting to see if I'd be serving on a jury ...  (I wasn't picked).  I still think it's amazing that I'm very pleased with the embroidery after two years have gone by since I did it.  The painted backgrounds really do work to set the piece off.

I had originally made a bunch of layered architectural collages that I intended to paint and embroider and so forth, as you might remember if you saw the original set of blog entries and the two that I completed.  But I hadn't touched them since I decided to stop selling paper collages in my etsy store.

It occurred to me that I could adapt them to the 6"x6" work that I'm currently doing so I spent some time thinking and planning and trimming and gluing.  The edges and corners didn't stay down real well, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do next - try and stick them down better or else sew them down with basic stitches that I expect to work on top of later.

I like how Silver, the first of these three 6"x6" pieces, turned out, so just two more to go.  I had originally planned making the tie down stitches more regular, but this worked out better, with some deliberately going over the fold and others not even reaching it.  I also dug out from my stash the remaining beads from those used in the original embroidery and added one at each corner of the canvas.

I had to go out and get thread of the right thickness for the other two, since I didn't have anything in an appropriate color.  I had originally planned to use darker colors for those, but all I really needed was even lighter colors than I'd originally planned.  I think it will work, but I'll have to wait and see.

I had to use a ridiculous amount of acrylic medium to adhere the piece of scrim to the canvas since the fabric was heavier than the cheesecloth I'd worked with before and I wanted it to have textured, uneven edges instead of lying flat.  I had success with positioning the scrim, then working pulling one section up at a time and putting down gel medium, then adding liquid medium on top and working that in lightly with a sponge brush.  I had tried using gel medium on top at first, but working that in moved the scrim around too much and distorted it beyond what I was interested in.  It took over 24 hours for everything to dry enough to work another step on.

Since the image doesn't look too different from the plan at this point I decided to crop it down to what I expect will be showing on front of the 12"x12" stretcher bars when the piece is complete, just to show you something different.  As you can see, I also went ahead and sewed the purple fabric to the Peltex square as well as doing the collage work.  Next step - watercolor crayons on the one hand and embroidery on the other hand.

I'm finding that one of the problems with not having much time to DO art is having too much time to THINK about it.

I thought myself into some knots about the idea of doing my footstep pieces based on grids when my favorite ones have a lot of movement in them, but then untwisted my ideas with reminder that I was trying to improve on one area - the integration of different media - and it would help with movement to have a little more mastery of that first.

I renamed my 6"x6" pieces in my head to "studies", even when they're complete works.  They are meant for ideas, experimentation, and entertainment.  Why I like them hasn't changed, only I pulled out better words.  I realized how much the tactile nature of my works on canvas meant to me. 

I got into thinking more about reproductions and business matters, partly because there was a discussion on etsy about some reproduction print sites I hadn't heard of before.  I've never felt that reproductions of my footsteps were particularly viable from a business sense, even though I currently have them available, because of the square size and all the texture that just isn't in the print.  So I wondered if I would like to have another line of art, something that would make it possible for me to justify my art as a business to the IRS before a decade or so had passed.

I figured that if I was going to do this then the art would need to be something with appeal to the market, likely something representational, and it would need to be reproducible in a standard framing size, like an 8x10.  I also wanted to keep my own style of working, although without as much texture.  I wanted it FLAT.  And then I would save all the texture and relief work for my art on canvas.  I realized I could meet my goals by doing watercolor crayon plus colored pencil plus basic embroidery on 11x14 sheets of paper.  I gave it a try, starting with a design in a Dover pictorial archive.  I spent a contented evening getting the first layer of the drawing down.  It was definitely less messy than needing to get everything out to work on the Footstep like I had originally planned to do during those couple hours.

It was turning out nicely but the next morning I realized that I really didn't want to do it.  The subject matter and treatment just weren't me.  And I started thinking agan.  Knowing it would be a few days or a week before I'd really get to do any art again.  I do have some more ideas, but I'll wait to share them until I try a bit of creation to actually develop them, otherwise they'll change and I'll spend all my time blogging little rambles!  This is rather frustrating.

I am also considering doing an art a day something - 5 minute sketch atcs or journal entries or some such - so I'm not away for days on end.  We'll see.

I mentioned that I had painted a 12x12 background - it was the blue shown here with more pieces on it.  The painting is slightly streaky but mostly solid.  I have had the teal silk rods for some time and then acquired the interestingly dyed cheesecloth in a trade.  When my papers came and I could see the true colors I thought the one in the upper right would go well with the materials I already had, so I played around a bit and came up with this arrangement.  I auditioned a couple different colors of fabric for the upper left, but liked this solid deep purple best.

This will be the first piece that I'll deliberately try to do on a grid or on quarters, following some of the thoughts that developed during and after QSDS.  I intend to make the painted quarter more interesting, collage on most of the right side, and stitch the upper left together.  I'm sure that I'll add more embellishment as I go, but this is the framework of my idea.