Tag: painting

Alien Plant Life

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?

Fun with ink and watercolor

I have been doing some experiments lately with watercolor and pen, and with water-based inks. I like the intensity of the colors I get with inks, although I don’t have as many colors (I buy small bottles of ink). It’s a lot of fun just to play around with the colors. I also tried putting a resist onto pages first with white oil pastel before applying ink. Take a look at my creations:

Here is the first experiment I did. I put blocks of color down all over the page, let it dry, and then went back in with pens.
Here is another with color blocks / splotches, and then using pen for markmaking.
Here I played around with inks. As you can see the colors are a lot more intense. I think you need to add a lot of water for layering / watercolor effects. I added some water soluble crayon to this while the ink was still wet.
Here you can see the resist from the oil pastels coming through. I love how the inks create different effects as they dry.
Here is another with inks and water soluble crayon (the black marks on this one).
This is my favorite from this batch. Although it’s abstract I feel like I’m looking at a desert scene here. I tried the oil pastel effect here, but also on top of one layer of ink (in the orange in the middle foreground) – it gives a cool effect here.

I don’t do a lot of watercolor painting typically but I love how it looks so it’s fun to experiment with it a bit. It’s also a bit meditative to just paint and add intuitive marks. Some of these I may cut up and put into collage, some I may keep as they are. What do you think? Do you like the intensity of the inks or do you prefer the more muted effect of watercolors?