Paper and Threads

After months of delay, I made another quilt journal page today, my 3rd for the week.  I really wanted to play with some of my figure drawing images on fabric, but just couldn't get started.  I'm sure that I was afraid that I couldn't successfully make what was in my mind.  So I had to force myself to select an image, resize it, print it, and pretend that I was just going to practice some stitching.  Of course I got excited when I started and now I think I'll be able to continue work on this series.

I am exploring ways to transfer figure drawings of a pregnant model to fabric and only using my own dyed fabrics for the quilt.  The image on the right was a watercolor and ink drawing I did in my sketchbook of a sculpture by the Israeli artist Ruth Bloch.  I transferred the JPEG to EQ Printable fabric with an Epson photo printer.  The seated figure was a fused applique using WonderUnder.  The image was stitched using free motion quilting.

                                             Size 8.5 X 11 inches

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I originally saw quilt journal pages at the Houston Quilt festival in 2002 and made many in 2003.  Conventionally, these are small art quilts that are 8.5 X 11" in size, although there aren't any fixed rules.  This year I decided to make more, using my figure drawings as inspiration and exploring a variety of ways to transfer the images to the fabric.  I finally had time to play this week and made two.

Quilt Journal Page #1: (Note: forgot to take my handsewing needles out - upper right corner)

I transferred the image to the background fabric and stitched around it with free motion quilting.  The background was colored with Neocolor II wax crayons and the entire piece was bound with hand-dyed fabric.

Quilt Journal Page #2:

The two images were stenciled with Jacquard fabric paint on a hand-dyed background fabric, and then quilted with free motion and straight stitching.  The binding is hand dyed fabric from my stash.

I still haven't tired of the images of the pregnant model from my figure drawing class, even though I used them to make many stamps and several small artist books.  I will probably use more of them to extend this series as I explore more fabric surface design techniques. 

Posted by Shirley at 7:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

The August summer break just ended at the Society of Illustrators and last night I went to Figure Drawing with my friends Istar and Casey.  Casey is visiting her family in N.J. from France and was able to come into the City for a visit.  I hope that she posts a few of her figure paintings to her blog when she returns home.  Her ink/watercolor drawings inspired me and gave me a new goal for 2011.

My current sketch book is slightly too big for my scanner, so there are lots of ugly scan marks.  I also had to increase contrast so my 6B pencil lines were darker, and all of my left-hended smudges then were more noticeable.   

There were two models, clothed, for every pose.  This was a sketch done of both of them during 5 minutes - just to try to capture their positions and clothing.

During another 5 minute pose, I sketched only the male model because he was in a challenging twisted position.

I sketched both models during the next two 20 minute poses - the male model without and with shirt and the woman in a negligee.

vvvvv

This is the beginning of my second year of live figure drawing and I am trying to spend more time on faces.  After I finished sketching both models during a 20 minute pose, I spent some time trying to better capture the face of the male model. 

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Linda Kemp's book, Watercolor Painting Outside the Lines, was mentioned on the Everyday Matters message board, and on View From the Oak Blog.  When I have gift cards, I buy this type of art technique book for my library and this year it is one of my goals to actually read and sometimes do exercises or demos from some of these books.  This was my book for August.

In order to really understand the technique of painting just the negative space, I had to try the first two exercises in this book.

Exercise 1:  Paint many different size circles in groups and paint only the negative space.  This painting has 5 layers.  I was quite messy, and didn't keep nice smooth edges, but I accomplished my goal.  I did understand the concept after doing this exercise.

I just found Linda doing this exercise on a You Tube Video.

Exercise 2:  Same technique, but with a stem with 2 leaves, and a watercolor underpainting.  Again, I was quite messy with the outlines, but now understood working wet-in-wet and creating interesting color washes.

Although I did this exercise from her book, I just found a demo of it on her website.

Extending the Lesson Using My Original Image:  Friends brought a lovely bouquet of flowers Saturday evening and I decided to use the flower and leaf shape from one of the flowers to create my own negative painting.

Then I created Two Magnetic Bookmarks using the same flower and leaf shapes.  The technique for making these was posted previously.  But now I use individual magnets sold at Staples as adhesive business card magnets - and I cut them in half vertically. 

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