Art(Raw) '09!

Several months ago I entered into an online juried auction at a site called iFontis.com. Evidently, the first stage of jurying is by popular vote, so if you'd like to vote for one (or all) of the three pieces I've submitted, you can CLICK HERE to vote for this piece:

 

CLICK HERE to vote for this piece:

And finally, CLICK HERE to vote for this piece:

 

Thank you, friends, and wish me luck!

Stitching, Mistakes, Lessons and CS. No. 5

This quilt critter got some of my attention last week in the form of free-motion stitching. My stitching over all was not too bad- not too great, either, but about what I would expect at this stage of my self-education. The stitching is ok- but the stitch choice and even the thread color choice were both pretty horrible.

21" x 29"

Not having had any kind of sewing or quilting background, I'm in the dark as far as guessing what type of stitching is appropriate for each area, and how to get stitching to help me tell my story. As a paper artist, when a particular design element wasn't working, or was more prominent than I wanted it to be, a little paint would push it right to the background and I could go on with my piece until it was complete. Not so with stitch lines.

It's going to take time to learn how, where and when to stitch, and what threads to use. I'm fortunate to have a good friend in snowy Canada, Elle, who has taken pity on my confusion and is flooding me with excellent information that will help fill in a lot of the gaps in my sewing education! Thank you, Elle!!

One incredibly important thing I did learn from this piece is that, for myself, the straight line stitch is far more fascinating. It leads the eye along on a trail of discovery. If I want a viewer to notice a particularly neat area of a hand-dyed or painted surface, a wiggly line heading to it and then playing around it will pull the viewer's gaze with it. Representational stitching on my own work, like I did with the leaf pattern on this piece, doesn't currently speak to me.

 

This piece has been constructed using only my own hand-dyed and painted fabrics. 

On other fronts, My CitraSolv/NatGeo Collages continue. I'm up to number 5 and I believe I have six more masonite panels to use up. 

CS. NO5, 2-8-2010, 16" x 18"

Once again, I kept the design simple because I wanted to play with tinting the papers with various mediums. Here, I've used both watercolor paints and fabric dyes to stain the papers once they've been applied to the masonite. 

Collage has always been difficult for me, I tend to agonize over every decision and have even walked away from- leaving incomplete- complex pieces I had worked on for months because I simply couldn't decide when they were finished.  Some pieces tell you, "STOP NOW!", while others will play cat-and-mouse with your muse until they exhaust you and send you away, bored and frustrated. Art is capricious that way.

The purpose of doing these collage is to try and break through my obsession with needing to over-analyze the placement, size, shape, value, color and relevance of every tiny element. I'll let you know if it worked when this series is complete.

My friends over at LQuilt have their forums up and running this week and I would love it if you'd come over and join me for discussions about fabric surface design, the tools we most love, and how to build your own stash of fabrics that you've created yourself, and any other subjects relevant to surface design!

See you there!

- Judi

No. 4 & A New Batch

This week I kept the Citrasolv/NatGeo collage simple and used only contrast to tell my story.

 

CS NO.4, 2-2-10, 16" x 18"

Because I don't want to use up all my WonderUnder on this series, to adhere this collage to its masonite substrate, I coated both the surface of the masonite and the backs of the papers I wanted to use with gloss medium. After they dried, I was then able to use my hot iron to collage the pieces down. 

I hit it with one coat of satin finish varnish to seal it. 

 

CS NO.4, 2-2-10, 16" x 18"

I've been going through a lot of papers to make this series and I still have six or seven re-purposed masonite pieces left to collage, so today, I melted another magazine. 

  

  

  

 

With this batch of papers, I learned from a couple of my previous mistakes and some slight adjustments yielded spectacular results. Last time, I got a lot of pages that were mostly black, and a lot more that all looked very similar to one another.

This time, I was more discriminating in picking my magazine- I sought one with a lot of brightly-colored photos, rather than one with darker photos and pages. Those dark, rich photos may look luscious in the magazine, but once the ink in them melts, they can become very black and indistinct.

The second thing I did, which took only a couple of minutes and, I think, made the biggest difference in my results this time as compared with the last, was that I went through the magazine first, page by page, and removed all the pages that had a lot of text and/or black areas. This helped to keep too much black ink from permeating every page in the melting process, and kept my colors bright and strong, and the patterning on each sheet sharp and clear.

Busy Week!

I got a lot done last week and throughout the weekend, so lets dive in!

I started the week LWI some inexpensive muslin with some excess dyes left over from last week's silk experiments.

Pretty boring except for this one piece, which took on a look similar to indigo.

 

Better quality muslin would- naturally- have yielded better results, but I had the fabric, I had the dyes, and I wanted to use it all up.  These lengths of cloth will be prime candidates for stamping, stenciling and other surface designs sometime in the future.

Next, I played a bit with discharge paste on some of my previously hand-dyed fabrics. I've used the paste in straightforward color removal before, but last week I wanted to explore using it to replace one color with another. I stamped, stenciled and screened both plain discharge paste and paste mixed with textile paints onto this piece of previously hand-dyed, dark gray fabric.

 

 36" x 48" 

I found that I preferred stamping the paste on, rather than pushing it through a stencil. Initially, the paste used through my stencil seemed to sit where I'd placed it, but over time it absorbed into the fabric and spread out, leaving me with large, white-ish blobs. Disappointing, but a good lesson- I suddenly heard Melly Testa's voice in my head from an old episode of Quilting Arts Tv: "Work very, very dry."

I finished that piece of fabric off by painting deep red curved and circular marks onto it and then dyeing it a deep rust color.

It's unsuccessful as a wholecloth piece, in my opinion- it's too dark overall- but it has some really lovely details in it, so it's likely I'll cut it apart one day and use it in pieces.

I switched tactics and fabrics and, following Melly's example of working dry (though she was using thickened MX dyes in her demo, not discharge paste), I ironed a freezer paper stencil onto another smaller scrap of hand-dyed fabric. I squeegied the barest amount of clear discharge paste over the stencil, making sure it was absorbed into the fabric before gently removing the stencil. This worked to give me crisp, clean edges.

What I found really fun, though, was the neat texture you can get when you "color replace" a second image on top of an image you've already discharged.

 

Here, I've stamped a 50/50 combination of discharge paste and transparent red and yellow textile paints onto a dark green background. 

 

I chose these two colors to demonstrate the efficiency with which the paste works to remove the original color. If I had simply not used the discharge paste, and stamped red and yellow textile paints onto a dark green background, the yellow would have nearly vanished and the red would have read as a muddy brown. But because the (green) color has been removed, both the red and the yellow read clearly for what they are.  

Here's another example of using discharge paste to remove dye from a hand-dyed fabric (this time in an earthy green) and replacing it with two other colors- yellow and turquoise...

Using discharge paste to create surface design is simple and effective, and is probably going to become a staple in my technique repertoire. 

Continuing throughout the week with more textiles, I did one last experiment dyeing silk veils. Once again, I cut two large veils into 16 pieces, soaked them in vinegar, wadded them into meatballs and froze them.

The results were again quite lovely.

 

I'm now ready to dive in and dye ten very large silk panels, parfait-style. Look for a post about those (and the reason for my sudden interest in silk) in the next few weeks.

And remember the down-and-dirty image of this piece?

It has now become this...

... and is getting both hand stitching...

... and free-motion machine stitching....

I hope to have it finished by the end of the week or sometime next week.

Tomorrow, look for a post about my CitraSolv collage, Number 4 and for details about my new association with LQuilt. 

Until then, happy creating!

CS NO. 3 (Collage)

CS No.3, 1-25-10,  16" x 18"

This was a fun piece to construct and went together fairly quickly, once it decided what it wanted to be. 

As usual, I started with a  piece of masonite (I love to recycle), which I covered with two layers of Wonder Under. Onto that substrate, with a hot iron, I collaged several whole sheets of melted magazine pages.

Wanting to change the background color a bit but also wanting to show the beautiful patterns and peculiarities of the original papers, I created a glaze combining a 50/50 mixture of gloss and matte mediums with a hint of Golden acrylic paint in dioxazone purple.

Once it was dried, I embellished the background with textile foil in copper. I continued to collage more cut pieces of magazine pages, again using Wonder Under as my adhesive.

 

(Detail)

(NOTE: for the Citra Solv/magazine trick, please see the most recent issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors or my first blog post about it (scroll down about halfway to find it.)