Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Exercises on Texture, Line, and the Integrated Background

I found these three moderately difficult and am not knocked out by the results, largely because it forced me to work in a way that is pretty alien.  That is to say, normally, I begin with some image in mind that is what, for me, the piece is going to be about.  But in this case, since I was having to pick fabric more or less independent of image, or fabric that would push the image, I hardly knew what to choose because I didn't know why to choose anything in particular.  But, anyway, here's the results.

#1.  I don't know that there is any fabric I wouldn't think of using, but the background in this piece is certainly hard to use.  It's some kind of upholstery fabric with very heavy threads in the weave and some kind of rubbery stuff in it which makes it weird to iron.  Even the silicon shoe kind of sticks to both the front and back of it.  From there on, it was just one different kind of texture after another.  I tried to incorporate a shiny, plain fabric (like satin) but was not successful because the shininess was offended by all the texture stuff.  It didn't feel like a contrast; more like an uninvited guest.  I've always wanted to use tassels but never found a sensible place.  Here, though it worked perfectly for me.  The red item is a biggish, ceramic, ladybug bead.


#2.  I had the image here before I started: a dancer in the woods at night.  So I picked a fabric that gave me depth (the dark blue woody print), a fabric that gave me movement (the yellow/green diamond print), and a fabric that gave me focus (the sunflower for her hair).  This one was fun and I think generally it works very well: ie, it did what I was trying to make it do.










#3.  Least pleased with this one.  Largely  because I couldn't get the goal very clear in my head.  I started with the rust-dyed greenish fabric in the background.  Then did the geode design, but wasn't all pleased with the results.  It looked blah-ish and without focus.  So then I put the rust-stripey batik strips in.  It's sort of okay, but I think what I ended up doing was integrating the foreground into the background, rather than integrating the background into the foreground.  But that was largely because I had the background image in my mind before I started and didn't have anything in mind about the foreground.


So, perhaps what I learned from this is that I do better if I start with an image and work to that than do whatever it seemed to me I was supposed to be doing here.  Which is to say, focusing initially on something beside an image.  Maybe it would be good for me to be able to do this successfully, but I'm not sure why when I seem to have a found of images in my head that attract me?

3 comments:

  1. i forgot to mention that the circular lace piece in the first photo is one of those truly odd thrift shop finds: a bag of 6 wine-glass base protectors. the back is linen, the front is crocheted with ecru thread and there's a slit in the crochet pattern so that you can slip the base of the wine glass into this little wine glass mitten. who knew we needed mittens for our wine glasses?

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  2. Judy - I love your second piece - makes me want to dance with her.
    Charis took some photo's of thepieces shown today so I'm sure they'll be up here soon

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  3. great! sometime when i'm up there, i should show you how to do those figures. they're cut in two pieces plus a head-oval. simple as pie, and everyone is a little different.

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