I finished this piece today. I’ve been working on it for awhile. I’ve titled it Alien Plant Life. It’s about 15 inches across x 17.5 inches tall (about 38cm x 43cm). It’s a mixed media textile piece on muslin, using fabric paint, fabric scraps and stitching. It started from a watercolor painting I had created, and grew from there.
Here is the original watercolor:
This painting was an exploration of some plant ideas I had been working on. I really liked how this had turned out, and had been starting to explore working in ways that bring all my various media work together – mixed media, painting, fabric art. I really like paint and collage but wanted a way to tie it into my textile art practice. I decided to recreate the painting as a textile art piece.
I first traced the painting onto muslin and then painted with fabric paint:
I then added fabric to the background in spots, to add some interest to the clouds and sky in the background:
I added corduroy strips to the larger plants in the foreground:
I then added a lot of stitching. Some straight stitch / kantha stitch for the sky:
I stitched the plants in the background with a sort of straight stitch (not sure if that is the correct term for what I did here.) I also added a lot of French knots, to make sort of suckers or flowers on the larger plants.
Here is the final again. I am really pleased with how it turned out:
I will do some more like this – using painting and paper collage for a design process that I then use to develop into textile pieces. The size of this was a bit daunting, so I will probably work a bit smaller next time. I may also take available frame sizes into account, I didn’t plan for what sizes are available so I may have to customize something for this size – I’m planning on putting some wood together to stretch it on for display.
I hope you enjoyed reading about the process. What are some ways you may have interpreted the painting for translating to a fabric piece?
