Embroidered Collage

  This is as far as I will go on this piece, but the ideas will be transferred to another piece.

I hadn't stitched for a while and thought I'd play with perforated paper - cardstock-weight paper with holes punched in it at regular intervals.  I decided to work within an ATC size piece, in this case a grid of 33 squares by 47 squares.  The idea that came to mind was the branching patterns often found on oriental carpets, which I've sketched in the past.  I also wanted to use a couple needlepoint stitches instead of just cross-stitches.

So I started the dark purple pattern, working back and forth in my mind so I'd have room for the counted elements and fit in the space available.  I thought about a complementary corner pattern and border and filled in part of the background.  I was enjoying myself.

Then I stopped and thought about it.  Did I really want to finish this piece?  Did I want to put all the time into finishing the pattern and stitching the background or I had I learned everything I was going to from it?

I decided to stop.  The paper fully covered by stitching was nice, but it wasn't really my style.  I really liked the pattern I developed, but the value differentiation and colors didn't really pop for me.  I wondered what would happen if I painted the perforated paper and then added certain parts of the pattern.  Could I collage on top of it or just with it?  How would it look overlaid on a similar or contrasting color background? 

I want to take another step and play some more.

I expanded on the pattern on the dress of this lady cut from the collage sheets that come with Somerset Studio to create this piece, another 8"x10" on watercolor paper.

I chose the yellow paper to blend into the background of the dress and moved those two pieces around until I was pleased with the placement.  I adhered them and used watercolor crayons to draw in the red and green triangles.  I wet my brush to turn the scribbles into paint, then started poking holes for adding stitching. 

I found out that the green blended in too much on top of the dress, which inspired the extra small red triangles, to make it obvious that the pattern overlapped the dress.  I also needed to add the stitching on the blank paper or the whole thing looked too abrupt.

This was where I intended to stop, but the big white space in the upper right was just too overwhelming, so I took a grey pen and did some scribbled storytelling there.  I like the look of the writing now that it's there.

Overall, though, I'm not thrilled with the piece.  It's too involved to be minimal and yet not layered enough for my taste.  It would look so much better on a complex cream background with different textures and colors peeping through.  On the other hand, I fulfilled my objective of developing a work by extending a pattern from a collage image, so it was a worthwhile exercise.

I decided to try another page where the ripple pattern was contained within a shape. The butterfly worked really well, especially since I carefully chose where to put the origination points.  Then I wondered what would happen if one ripple set off the other ripples as it expanded to touch the origination points.  This page was my first try and I wasn't pleased with the effect.

For the second try I only expanded one origination point at a time, switching to a new one as the ripple I was working on touched it.  The pattern turned out very different than the rest of the sketchbook and more appealing than the first version.

I visited the Michener Art Museum and took a closer look at one of the geometric based pieces of modern art.  The patterns could have been used to fill the entire picture plane, but instead it made an irregular shape with less detail at the edges.  I decided to try a version of that with the ripple pattern.

I thought the result was interesting enough that I tried two other variations, creating blank space in different parts of the picture to change the visual emphasis.  I think I like the third one best, especially since it seems to have a three-dimensional effect to it.

See the previous three spreads.

 This was so easy and worked out so well! 

I started with a soft rubber squeegee applicator and made vertical streaks with liquid acrylics, some transparent and some blue.  Then I dabbed in just a few touches of green and magenta with a paper towel.  The papers took the paint differently, as I had intended, but the whole thing was a little too bright and still kind of choppy.  It was going to overwhelm the elements I wanted to place on it.

My hand happened to brush over a bottle of titan buff, which I hadn't tried yet, so I dripped out a little and rubbed it in.  It seemed to work, so I kept going.  I was kind of afraid that it was going to run everything together too much, but instead I got just the right level of blending.

It reminds me of the backgrounds that I see in the magazines and I'm absolutely thrilled that I created it.  Next I'll be adding the lace...

Woohoo!  The Art-o-mat at the Doylestown library has been cycled out from when I first blogged about finding it last year.  The current machine has some nifty gears and shiny bits in with the robot that don't show up well in the photograph.

Of course, I had to buy a bit of art.  I chose a mini art quilt by Nikki Wheeler and a collage by Rachel Freeman.  Both are nice pieces and I'll store them with my atcs.  As a bonus, Rachel's collage has a neat paper hinge so it will stand up on its own.  I had to jiggle and fuss with the machine to get it to accept the tokens but it was a great deal of fun.

Color again - but this time colored pencil instead of markers.  I love how this medium lays down on the paper of the moleskine sketchbook.  It gives me a lot more room for shading if I want to make the pieces appear more three dimensional than the overlapping does on its own.  The design element of having one circle be squiggly lines instead of smooth also seemed to work well.

I couldn't continue with the color because we were traveling, so I did another divided field, this time varying the size of the circular ripples for each function.  This page took me longer because of the small circles, but I really liked the effect.

A friend who saw the sketchbook at this point liked the page with ovals and circles and suggested I add triangles, too.  So I gave that a try.  I'm not particularly happy with this incarnation.  I think the shapes get lost in the other similarities.  It needs a focal point or difference of some sort.  But that's not the fault of the combination of shapes.

At some point it occurred to me that the ripples looked something like the contours on a map, so I did a page emphasizing the similarity.  I used the smallest pen point I had and deliberately held the pen differently for this one so as to get more irregular lines. 

I was a bit bored and didn't know what to do next, so I gave myself freedom to deviate further from my doodle algorithm.  I drew one curvy line and continued until I had a horn, after a fashion. I confined the usual pattern to one small section, but referenced it with the circles elsewhere.  Not bad, but I think I can do more with the concept.

See the previous three spreads.