Stitch The Sketch #14: Sunflower Again

In this episode, I decided to draw a sunflower again. I drew this sunflower in black and white in episode 5. If you didn’t get a chance to see the photos nor watch the video in episode 5 do check it out.

When I grabbed a yellow hand dyed fabric from my stash, I decided it was time to draw another sunflower. I’ll tell you more about why my fabric stash and everything in my studio is in disarray.

This time I got to cheat. Because I didn’t have to draw a sketch from scratch since I’d drawn this same flower before. So here’s the sketch from the other episode I worked off of.

Pencil Sketch

When I challenged myself to this weekly project for all 52 weeks of this year, I didn’t realize it was going to became a major part of my year. I assumed, I’ll spend a few hours a week and I’ll be done with it. The ease and excitement of episode 1 really sucked me into the challenge but by challenging myself every week to take on bigger risks, I find myself spending more and more time stitching these sketches than I’d originally planned for. On average, I spend 6 hours on each sketch, sometimes twice that time and on episode 5, I spent triple that time (18 hours) just stitching the sketch.

All that said, I cannot say enough how blessed I feel to have this opportunity to take an uncharted path like this (for me), just to explore and to discover what I can, by using stitch exclusively. And to have all of you to share this journey with is truly amazing.

So after several hours of fun stitching, and yes it has been a lot of fun, (especially since I began introducing color in my stitches), here’s the front view of the sunflower drawn with thread.

Front View of Stitched Drawing

Reverse View of Stitched Drawing

VIDEO

Tips, Techniques, and Tools

Sunflower Again: How to Cover Up Mistakes in Your Thread Sketch

I see drawing with thread like drawing with ink  There’s no way to erase or pick out the stitches when you make a mistake. Yes, I know of a seam ripper but I don’t have time to use that. With heavily stitched thread drawing it’s even unwise to try do that. What I do though, is to use a darker shade of the same thread to draw (stitch) over the mistake to correct it.

In the video above, I didn’t get all the outlines right when I quickly stitched over them. However, when I went back with the darker value threads, I corrected those mistakes by drawing (stitching) over the lines several times.

What challenges are you working on?  I’d love to hear from you. Can’t wait to see you in the comments section.

Warmest Regards,

 

 

Watch all the Stitch the Sketch Videos and read about the techniques.