For a while, I’ve been talking about my region’s upcoming exhibition, “Inspired by Science”. Well, the prospectus provides two options for members of my art group to enter their works – A trunk show and then the main show.
The size requirement for the trunk show is 12″ x 12″. Since I’m the managing curator for the show, I’ve got to set a good example, right. So well, I don’t have a choice. I’ve got to enter a piece in the main exhibit as well as in the trunk show.
So I started working on my trunk show piece a couple of weeks back. And I shared work in progress photos of the first part with you. This week, let’s continue where I left off.
I’m going to be doing some creative drawing to add details.
I began by adding more branches to the dendrites
Next, I started to add small colorful organic shapes cut out of fabrics
And finally, I drew some more cell-like shapes using thread.
And here are a few detail photos.
I haven’t posted a video of me drawing with thread for a long time so this time I did. Check out the video to see the steps I took to create this trunk showpiece.
Your Turn
I think I may have added too many details with the threads. My original idea was not to have so much detail in the background. What do you think? Do you think the details turned out to be an overkill or you like it just the way it is?
Write your thoughts down in the comments section. I can’t wait to hear what you’ve got to say. Chat soon.
Warmest Regards,
You may also be interested in these posts in the series:
Part1: Basting with Fusibles
Part2: Gain Color Confidence Now
Part 3: Line Drawings with Thread
Part 4:
The Effect of Accountability Partners on Your Creative Practice
Celebrations Time Com’on
Pop a champagne and bring out the confetti. I made it to the 50th piece in my Stitch the Sketch series, woohoo!! I challenged myself to create 52 pieces of work with stitch as a design element and I’m well on my way to completing the challenge.
It’s hard to believe I’ve come this far and I’ve got only two more to go. When I started out, I wasn’t expecting it to be so intense, so much fun, such hard work and long nights. But in all of this, the biggest takeaway has been the confidence boost and growth. I’m creating things now that I thought would have taken me several years of practice to be able to do.
I’ll definitely like to take a break after the 52nd piece to regroup and decide on what I want to do next. Being in a challenge has been great for me. It has kept me focused and given me something to work on each week.
It’s a little scary to know the challenge will be ending soon. The challenge became a safety net for me – a treasure trove of inspiration ideas. It became a place where I could go to get an idea to work on. And you, this community, became my accountability partner. The two of you together, made me show up each day in my studio.
The Importance of an Accountability Partner
My safety net – my endless source of creative inspiration – will soon be gone with the challenge. But you, my accountability partner, will continue to be here with me.
You guys in this community have been very supportive, you’ve been my cheerleaders and I knew that you were always here waiting for me to show up with a new episode of Stitch the Sketch. You were here to celebrate and to encourage me to go create some more.
Starting a creative project is hard but when you get started, it can also become hard to finish. When the novelty wears off, which can happen real fast, (for creative people), you need something to keep you going back there to work on it. That’s when an accountability partner becomes helpful.
Whether your accountability partner is an individual or group, or professional organization, they help keep your focus on creating and finishing, so you’ll have something to show as evidence of your efforts. There were many times when I encountered challenges along the way. Like the time when I had trouble with my sewing machine or when I fell ill, or when my studio got flooded.
Yes, there were many reasons for me to have stopped along the way but your friendship and partnership pushed me over the hump. Thank you.
Here’s why everyone must have an accountability partner as I had you.
Benefits of Having An Accountability Partner
An accountability partner:
- Supports Your Progress
- Helps you Stay Focused
- Ensures You’re Being Consistently Creative
- Makes You Gain Confidence
- Keeps You on Track with Your Goals
- Becomes a Sounding Board for You
- Encourages You
If you don’t have a friend, or community serving as your accountability partner, find one now. A good accountability partner will help you achieve more than you’re doing now. This here is a great supportive community. Share your projects and creative struggles with us and you’ll get support for them just as I did for mine. We’ll encourage you and celebrate you.
In the meantime for the month of March, I’ll be the Resident Artist on a blog called … “And Then We Set it on Fire“. I know I said I was taking a break. Yes, I did say that. But I’m going to be the resident artist just for one month. The blog is a techniques based blog. Most of the techniques featured are surface design techniques.
To my knowledge, no one has done anything with thread sketching or drawing with thread on the blog before. It’s intimidating although somewhat good to be the first. I’m really excited to share my techniques with The Fire blog community and to help them be their creative best.
Here’s the video for this week.
50th Piece Celebrations
Last week, I told you I was going to recreate the piece I made and add a little circle to the upper right corner. Just to satisfy my inner critic. I got to do it in the 50th piece. It is the small orange circle at the top. It didn’t quite appear on the right-hand-side. But it made it to the top. You can compare this week’s piece and last week’s.
Thanks guys for being my accountability partner. I wouldn’t have taken the trouble to recreate another piece just to add a small circle to the top if I hadn’t promised you I’ll do it. And if I didn’t know you were expecting me to. You guys are the best.
Warmest Regards,
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3 Ways to Get Rid of Unfinished Objects
This was a week in which everything that could go wrong in the studio, did. I wasn’t so surprised that so many things went wrong. What I was surprised at, though was why I didn’t give up. Why in the world did I persist, putting up with all of that stuff? Before I give you my thoughts on that, let’s start from the beginning, shall we?
For starters, I spent a couple of days painting my background fabric like I did with last week’s piece. Wanting to push the envelope a little more, I experimented with more new ideas.
So after doing several coats of paint, I let it dry overnight. The next day when I woke up to look at the painted fabric, I didn’t like it. Well, that’s not quite true.
I did like it very much. I’d been successful in creating a nice fabric design But it wasn’t what I had in mind for this week’s sketch. It was too patterned and I was looking for something a lot more solid.
So I went back and did another painting, this time on canvas and that came out just like I had in mind.
Next, I enlarged my pencil sketch to fit the size I wanted to work in. That’s when I realized that, I hadn’t drawn my pencil sketch in the same proportions to my finished piece.
More Resistance …
So yet another hiccup – my enlarged piece wasn’t looking quite like what I wanted. An empty space had been created on the bottom right-hand side.
Although I labored over the enlarged design all day and night, I couldn’t fix it. And then just before turning in, in the wee hours of the morning, I figured out a solution that I was satisfied with.
When it comes to the hiccups I encountered while stitching, I don’t even want to get started. All I’ll say about that is, I learned something new about threads.
You can have one terrible spool of thread among an otherwise high-quality batch of threads.
Granted, persistence is an important characteristic of creativity. We’ve talked about that here many times but my question is why do you persist even when you have good reason to quit.
After careful thought, here are the reasons I came up with.
3 Things That Make You Persist with Your Creative Project
- Accountability: Having someone or a group of people that looks forward to seeing your work persist even when you want to quit. I remember once at an art group meeting someone said to me, “you haven’t shown any work in a while”. This was a couple years of ago but I still remember. When you have an accountability group, creating work ceases to be solely about you and more about those who enjoy seeing your work.
- Deadlines: I create every day because I’d set a personal deadline to create one piece every week. If you have deadlines, whether self-imposed or otherwise, you’ll persist until the end. You know how when you have a deadline, you keep procrastinating till the deadline is close. Then you jump to action and work hard right to the deadline, to complete whatever project you have? Yeah, deadlines have that effect on making you persist to the end.
- Personal Satisfaction: Being able to accomplish a feat, to cross it off your to-do list sometimes, can also be enough motivation to persist in your creative endeavors.
So if you have challenges with how to persist in creating, you should incorporate these 3 things into your creative practice. Join a critique group, set deadlines for yourself and have a to-do list of things you want to create. That’ll surely help you avoid having lots of Unfinished Objects (UFOs) lying around.
Your Turn
What are some of the ways you have employed to help you persist in creating even when the going gets tough? Can’t wait to read your comments.
Warmest Regards,
I’ve always loved surface design and being able to revisit it again is really fun. This time it seems to be more focused on painting, not hand dyeing or some of the other techniques I’ve done in the past.
Winter has a way of either getting you down in the down doldrums with cabin fever or frantically searching for an outlet. So I’m glad that painting has become that outlet for me.
Like I did last week, I painted my background fabric with diluted acrylic paints. This time I used a white cotton fabric instead of a canvas. The effect was pretty much the same except for in weight. The painted canvas was of course, heavier than the painted cotton solids. And the painted cotton solids heavier than their unpainted friends.
Printing Geometric Shapes
However, to add a little more interest to my background, I went a little further and printed some shapes onto my background fabric. Dipping the lids of circular bowls and jars into paint, I printed the circular shapes onto the fabric.
Well, just as with any creative process, things don’t always follow a defined path and they sure didn’t this time. My printed circles were too perfectly round, which isn’t the look I was going for.
Yes, I knew the look I was going for but I didn’t quite get there. So, in came another coat of diluted acrylics. A couple of light brushstrokes over the background fabric and suddenly, the printed circles were not so perfect anymore.
Adding a Layer of Texture to Background Fabric
Moving along, it was now time to add another layer of interest – texture. Using the printed circles as templates, I stitched quilting designs that fit right into the circles.
This did not only create texture but also added to the unity of the design. My printed circles and designs were both the same geometric shapes.
Drawing with Fabric Collages
And now to the foreground, I cut out hand dyed fabrics in curvy shapes to create the design I had in mind. I was going for a cropped version of another design I’d previously created here. I didn’t want to draw all the curvy shapes with fabric collages. So I marked some of the curves to draw with thread sketching later.
Design Challenges
Well again, I hit a snag. At this point, the design wasn’t quite coming together as I’d hoped. There was too much negative space in the upper right-hand corner and it just wasn’t looking balanced. I tried to arrange the elements on the foreground as best as I could but it just wasn’t coming together. Hmm, what do I do?
Then. I remembered one of my old design tricks – the upside-down design technique. So I rotated my work and started arranging the elements in that orientation. And what do I know, it worked!
So the lesson here: The process of creating doesn’t always go smoothly. And of course, there’s no guarantee that the failures along the way will lead to success. But if you give up, you’ll never know what you may have created.
Your Turn
What lessons are you learning in your studio practice this week?
Warmest Regards,
This has been a fun week working with an acrylic painted fabric. For a while now, I haven’t been satisfied with the backgrounds of my work. I felt they were just plain boring. So, I’ve been thinking of ways to kick it up a notch.
I got my opportunity this week when I decided to paint some fabrics to use as my background instead of the solid black background fabric I’ve been using recently. Although I’ve painted fabrics before, this time I wanted to try an acrylic painted fabric, not a dye painted fabric.
Unprimed Canvas
I started off with a piece of unprimed canvas that I purchased by the yard from a fabric store. I knew going in that using an unprimed canvas will mean, the canvas will absorb more of the paint. But that’s the look I was going for. Not the look where the paint adheres to the top surface of the acrylic painted fabric.
So I chose the unprimed canvas for this effect. Secondly, I chose it so I’ll have an easy time sewing through my acrylic painted fabric. I knew that if I had the paints sitting on top of a primed canvas, it’ll be difficult to stitch through.
Diluted Acrylic Paints
Furthermore, I aggressively diluted my paint with water to about 50% water and 50% acrylic paint. It created a form of an acrylic wash. This also helped to reduce the “plastic-y” feel of the paint. Thus making it easier for me to stitch through later.
Drying the Acrylic Painted Fabric Between Washes
I used the acrylic wash to paint over the canvas several times. I used different values of blue and gray paint. My final acrylic painted fabric must have been painted at least 10 times. Each time, I let it dry before applying another wash. I used a hair dryer to hasten things along. Letting it dry first before applying another wash ensures that the previous colors get the chance to set.
Then I drew two curves in blue and orange on top of the background. The design I was going for is the cropped version of this design that I created a few weeks ago. Drawing on the painted canvas was very challenging for me. Because I drew shapes freehand on the acrylic painted fabric, I was working so hard to get them perfectly placed.
As much as I try to avoid perfectionism because I know it’s bad for creativity, sometimes I just find myself tangled up in it. When that happens, I have to talk myself out of it to keep moving. Although I managed to make myself move along, I won’t lie to you. I went back a couple of times to try and perfect those two curves. (You’d notice in the video below that I went at it again with thread sketching.)
After I was satisfied with the colors and somewhat satisfied with the curves, I hang my acrylic painted fabric to dry for 48 hours. I don’t think I needed to wait that long. But I wasn’t quite ready to go back to working on it any sooner. So it all worked out great. The paints got a chance to set and I got a chance to work on other things.
Quilting The Acrylic Painted Fabric
Ultimately, I knew, I wanted to add thread sketching to this piece to add texture and to increase its interest. I planned to use thread to draw a few more shapes but I knew I’d have lots of negative spaces on my acrylic painted fabric. Since I wanted to prevent that from causing puckering issues, I decided to first quilt the entire background before thread sketching.
Fabric Collages Fused to Acrylic Painted Fabric
Now to add more elements to this mixed media project, I cut out some curves from fabric and fused it to my now quilted, acrylic painted fabric.
Thread Sketching
Watch the video to see me adding thread elements to this complex piece.
The Big Reveal
And now, here you have it, drum roll, please…….. “Infinity” – Hand-dyed, acrylic painted fabric, thread sketched and free motion stitched.
Overall Front View
Close Up View of the Front
Overall – Rear View
Close-Up Back View
Perfectionism tried to stop me but I wouldn’t let it.
Your Turn
What do you think about stretching your creativity and trying something new like I did this week? Have you used an acrylic painted fabric in your work before? What challenges did you face? Can’t wait to hear from you.
Warmest Regards,
The year 2017’s first piece – “Blue Nodes”- is done. Woo hoo!!! I continued with my Circular Blocks series from last year here. This time I went back to using a different color other than black as my background. As you’ll notice, I’m using a color scheme that you might recognize from some of my earlier work.
Refine, Repeat, and Reorganize
In the final pieces of this series, what I’m trying to do is to “tighten” the parameters with which I work. I’ve explored a lot of angles in this series and I feel like it’s time to refine, repeat, and reorganize the last few pieces to more clearly fit into a recognizable pattern. So “Blue nodes” begins this effort.
In that vain of “fitting into a recognizable pattern” – as all work in a series should – I repeated the circular block shapes. And I used a variety of thread sketching techniques to add texture and interest to the piece.
I’m still not quite satisfied that I achieved my aim of keeping these last pieces very simple. I do like a minimalistic look. And I often try and shoot for that in some of the abstract work that I create. But until now, I haven’t quite hit it yet.
Why Would You Want to Work in A Series?
Thankfully, I’m working in a series and this is where one of my favorite benefits of working in a series kicks in. That is, I get to refine, repeat, and reorganize my ideas in the next piece. So although, “Blue Nodes” didn’t quite make it in terms of a minimal design, the next piece might just do that.
And this might just answer the question that sometimes folks ask about working in a series. “How can you work on the same thing for a long time without getting bored?” I think it’s because every subsequent piece in the series, you’re trying to achieve something new. You’re trying to explore a different angle. Working in a series might seem limiting but it’s actually liberating.
This quote from the painter Chuck Close sums it up very well.
“When everything in the world was a possibility, I only tried three or four things over and over …once I decided I was going to have relatively severe limitations, everything opened up”
I’m looking forward to “everything opening up” as I limit myself by refining, repeating and reorganizing the basic elements in my design.
Your Turn
What new projects have you begun working on this year? Are you refining, repeating and reorganizing some stuff or are you starting completely new?
Warmest Regards,
Watch all the Thread Sketching Videos and Learn the Thread Sketching Tips & Techniques.
Funny name – “Bubbly Bubbles”. But there’s what came to me when I looked at this week’s piece. It looked so bubbly, full of energy and excitement. It has that holiday spirit of energy and excitement so I couldn’t help but name it “Bubbly Bubbles”
What do you see when you look at it? I know we all have different interpretations of art and we all react to artwork differently. But this is what I see: energized atoms, excitedly jumping around due to their high energy states. Oh, no, doesn’t that sound like a science class.
This Week’s Goal
Well, I hope you can already tell how much fun I had with this one. My goal for this week was to go back to a color scheme I like but I haven’t been using lately. My secondary goal was to incorporate transparencies in a less deliberate way.
That second goal has been a challenge for me for about a year. I love creating the illusion of transparencies using fabrics and it is one of the reasons I dye my own fabrics. Since dyeing my own allows me to get the gradations I need to create transparencies.
But creating transparencies in a structured and well planned out way comes easy to me as you can see in this piece here and in that piece here. However, doing it randomly without having it appear in specific sections has been eluding me for a while. So although, I tried to incorporate transparencies in “bubbly bubbles”it was without much success.
To be Tried Again Another Day
Yet, I still learned a lot from the thinking process that went into trying to acheive this goal. I figured that if I went back to incorporate the value shading stage into my process, I’ll be more successful. As a result of trying to complete a piece each week, I took that step out of the process to hasten things up. But I’m convinced that’s what I’m missing.
So, although I wasn’t quite successful this time around in creating transparencies the way I want to, I have something to work on the next time I try. Isn’t that what it’s all about – continuous improvement?
What creative skill have you been trying to master, that you find yourself going back to over and over again to improve?
Watch all the Thread Sketching Videos and Learn the Thread Sketching Tips & Techniques.
As we get into the holiday season, I’m grateful for the things I’ve had a chance to experience this year. I’m grateful for the freedom to express myself through art and the confidence to try in the first place. And I’m very grateful for all the people my artwork has allowed me to connect with. I’m especially grateful for this community of like-minded people. My life is richer for knowing you.
As I reflect on episode 41 of stitch the sketch, I’m grateful for how far I’ve come in this project. When I started out I didn’t have a clue where this path will lead me. And now here I am 11 months after I embarked on this journey and I still don’t know everything about how the next piece I create will turn out.
Grateful for Hard Times
I’m grateful that when things got hard, and I couldn’t see how I’d possibly be able to make the time to juggle all the responsibilities that I have, I somehow found the strength to keep going. I’m especially grateful for you because you became my accountability partner on this journey. Knowing that you there rooting for me to succeed, helped me show up for the next episode. Thank you. 🙂 🙂 🙂
Grateful for You
I’m grateful for your words of encouragement. I feel truly blessed whenever I hear you tell me how much I’ve inspired you. I don’t mean it lightly when I say that you inspire me to inspire you.
And before I go, I’ve got to share what I did in Episode 41 with you. When I compare episode 1 with episode 41, what a difference!!! In episode 41, I concentrated on two things.
Thick Lines
I used thick lines to shade. To achieve this I stitched repeatedly over the same line a couple of times. I experimented with three different ways of using thick lines to shade.
- One was with the use of straight up and down stitches parallel to each other then,
- I had parallel stitches radiating from a central point and then finally
- Curvy stitches which I stitched parallel to each other by traveling a short distance and then repeating the shape.
Negative Space
The second thing I explored in this episode is the use of negative space. I went back to episode 39 and built on the effect I created with the negative space in that piece.
As you can see, each episode builds on something from the previous episode. This has led to so much growth in my technical skills. And for that too, I’m grateful.
Warmest Regards,
Watch all the Thread Sketching Videos and Learn the Thread Sketching Tips & Techniques.
Woo hoo! We move into the forties this week – episode 40!!! Yay!! I love the sound of that. I’m still a couple of episodes behind (6 to be exact) but we’re making progress. So that’s all that counts right now. 🙂 This week I decided to think harmony as I created this piece. So I used very cool colors. Therefore, to achieve this, I chose threads in yellows, greens, and blues.
I chose a couple of shades and tones of each of my three colors. I had both lights and darks in each color. What that did was, to create very beautiful transparent effects in areas where some circles overlapped.
I was especially pleased with how the blue threads worked out. They blended so well in areas where I had yellow fabric as the background. It went to highlight something I’ve talked about before. That is the color
Another thing I did in this series is to return to using mainly threads to color or shade the outlines I drew with my sewing machine needle, rather than fabric.
Harmony With Threads
Coloring with thread means that in areas where I want a solid color, I needed to have my stitch lines close together. And in areas where I wanted light tone/shade, I needed to put some spaces between the stitches.
I found it interesting to work at achieving harmony, though. While some part of me wanted to jump in there with some bright and contrasting thread colors , another part was not in the mood for that. Eventually, by restraining my choice of colors, team harmony won.
It’s fun to color a drawing but a good color scheme is only created by restraint. Often when you throw every color in your toolbox at your project, you find that harmony is lost. But when you select only a few colors and stick to them you rather gain control of the narrative you want to create.
So this piece primarily became an exercise in thread shading or thread coloring as I sometimes call it. Since I had only minimal fabric coloring. As a result, the areas in which I colored with fabric became focal points. They became areas of interest which did not detract from the piece as a whole but added to its overall quality.
In conclusion, I sort of like the horizontal orientation of this piece rather than the vertical. So I’m going to deviate from the vertical presentation this week.
What are your thoughts on “All About Harmony”?
Warmest Regards,
Watch all the Thread Sketching Videos and Learn the Thread Sketching Tips & Techniques.
A negative space is the space that surrounds the subject in a piece of artwork. It’s easy to forget or ignore the negative space when designing artwork. And that’s exactly what I’d been doing for the past couple of weeks since I started working on the circular blocks series. I’ve been so intent on finding out different ways to present circles that I’ve completely ignored the negative space around them. So in this series, I set out to rectify that.
#1 Negative Space Idea
To achieve a more interesting design where the negative space is not an after -thought but, planned for and incorporated in the design, I chose to use different color fabric collages in the negative spaces. When previously, I’d have simply left them bare.
Highlighting the negative space in only certain areas and not everywhere in the entire piece really added some mystery and interest to the piece this time. I think that the reason, the negative space in this piece had such an impact is because the subject (circles) is predictable and you can easily follow their curvature with your eyes. However, with the negative spaces, you can never tell what you’ll get. The negative space that is created depends on the sizes, shapes, and arrangement of the shapes of the neighboring circles.
#2 Negative Space Idea
In the same vein of exploring negative spaces, I experimented with a shading technique which didn’t involve stitching closely together. Rather, I stitched thick parallel lines a little distance apart from each other. Thus allowing the space in between the lines to show and be part of the design. This in my opinion also worked well in adding interest to the design.
#3 Negative Space Idea
Finally, working along the same lines of focusing on negative spaces, I approached dividing the entire workspace differently. I allowed a lot of the background fabric to be left alone in the lower third of the piece. I used a narrow piece of fabric collage to form a diagonal line to add movement to that space and left that space entirely free of any art elements.
You’d notice that in this piece I did go back to one of my favorite color palettes – blue and orange. And let’s just say I wasn’t at all disappointed with my choice of colors.
I’ve got the video below for you to see how I stitched it all together.
Question: Have you considered focusing on negative spaces in your artwork?
Warmest Regards,
Watch all the Thread Sketching Videos and Learn the Thread Sketching Tips & Techniques.