Retrospective (7/24/2016)
Patch #199 Quail
There's lot of room for growth, but I'm happy to document where I am in the journey.
Original Post
And, as you can see, Don has been working with much the same palette in his latest assemblage ...
I'm finally comfortable with the process that has evolved of blogging every day, sometimes with a patch, sometimes not. When I get around to working on patches for the days I've skipped, the blog posts trigger the ideas that end up in stitch.
It was the beach towels that I blogged about on July 4th that got re-imagined with my latest thrift store linen find ...
Then the safety pin on the July 5th post caught my eye. I sketched one, but it turned out to be a bit too big. Rather than try to redraw it, I reduced the image to 75% on my copier, pricked the outline, and marked it into cloth ...
I've learned that I trust my eye more with needle than with pen in hand, so I just followed the general direction of the dots using Jude's split backstitch, finessing the single strand of floss as needed ...
My last patch for the day involved the picture-book quilt in the July 6th post. When I brought it up on my iPhone, it occurred to me that I could enlarge the picture to fit a 1 3/4" patch and lay it on my copier to get a perfect-sized image to work from ...
Then I once again pricked holes in photocopied image ...
and used water-erasable marker to convey the design to cloth ...
A bit of practice with two-strands of floss convinced me that the marker dots were too hard to follow, so I sketched in blocks with my XS Pitt pen ...
with a very satisfactory end-result.
And just so I have something to work with for today's patch (whenever I get around to it), I took a picture of our first-ever pair of quail, spotted by Don just as we were sitting down to lunch ...
If you squint, you can just make out the male sitting on a rock directly above the airplane on the left (and no, Don didn't make the mobile, though I'm sure he could) ...
The quail are well worth remembering, but I'm not yet sure if this is how it will go ...
I'll let you know what I come up with ... eventually.
stitching is one thing, drawing is another, all artists need to draw from life no matter what their choice of medium. Drawing is an investigation not an end in itself, by observing how light & shade, line & weight, space and form work together, all that brings life to the line. When I worked as a glass engraver, the only moment of freedom was getting the main lines sketched in with a chinagraph pencil, an assured line gives the work life, a pounced line can work perfectly but it loses that essential liveliness in the translation...
ReplyDeleteSpoken as a true artist ... for me, drawing is a struggle compared to stitching. So, at this point at least, I'm trying to find a way to approximate line so I can focus on stitch. I have no illusions about the "artfulness" of it, but there is no question that I'm enjoying the exploration of new ways to get where I'm going.
DeleteIt also gives me a real appreciation for the innate skill and exhaustive practice required to render a drawing that is true to life.
your stitching & weaving is superb Liz, when I see your work I think of the great tapestry weaving houses in France that have translated art into weave and stitch, these are the skills you have developed in your lifetime, one of the biggest things I learned at the Bower Bird Blues workshop with India Flint and Roz Hawker is I am so slow and wobbly at stitching! (the other is I will never ever do a workshop in real life again!)
DeleteI remember your post after the workshop ... how exhausting it was. And your words about my stitching are much appreciated, but I would question your evaluation of your own, which holds the same soft touch that you bring to pen and ink, pencil and gouache.
DeleteThe irony is that I have (for now) left behind the stitching I've done most of my life to try on this new-to-me thing called patchplurk (wink). The bottom line for me is not the end product so much as the pleasure of being lost in the making. That, more than anything, is my bliss.