Adding Texture to Textile Art - CLARA NARTEY

I’m excited to share a recently completed piece with you. Those on my mailing list have already seen the finished piece. If you’re not on my mailing list you might want to join now so not to miss anything.

For some time I’ve been working on striking a balance between adding too much texture to my work against too little. My thing is, I like to do the thread drawing thing with my sewing machine (aka FMQ). But I strive to strike a balance between overwhelming the design with texture and thereby obscuring the design versus under-using texture.

I’ve noticed that when it comes to my abstract work, I’m able to freely let go and allow the design to dictate what “decorative stitches” to add. However, when it comes to my figurative work, I find it more of a challenge to integrate a lot of thread drawing. My concern has been that texture in the wrong places distorts the look of the skin of the figure I’m trying to portray.

As a result of this balancing act I recently noticed that subconsciously, I’ve reduced how much thread drawing I do on all my work. So in this piece -“Mobiles #1″I made a conscious effort to not hold back. I decided to just let the design show me where and what to draw. I think I achieved that.

Now, that I’ve regained my freedom of expression with an abstract piece, the important thing is to transfer this freedom to the next figurative piece I create. And that’s a challenge I’m looking forward to. I’ll report on the progress of that later.

Here is a short slideshow I created to show you how I made “Mobiles#1” and incorporated a lot of texture.