Making Art with Fabric

i’m beginning to do nebula / galaxy handkerchief squares. i’ve just ordered 2 dozen 17×17 heavy silk satin squares, so i’ll see what i figure out what to do with them.

i’m in the middle of this one. just wanted to show the originals on the right and my silks on the left.

 this one i love for the blues, but i can’t find the source photo, and don’t begin to know where i looked on the internet

 

 this one didn’t quite become the 3 dimensional form i wanted

 

 i believe this is ncg 281. what form

 

 this is the least successful one. i have to learn about spreading the sugar syrup and dyeing in layers before i try this one again.

 

 but oh how beautiful a subject. i think it’s orion nebula.

 

 i really love how this one turned out.

 

 the rosette nebula.

 

 an early attempt, proving that i can’t draw without a reference.

 

 the trailing blobs of syrup worked well, but i have to learn to bleed out the resist line, and to get colors incorporated into the creeping resist.

 this might be the pinwheel galaxy.

 

after putting in the central figure and finishing it as much as i knew how at the time, i found stretchers at 80″ and 50″, which would just barely work. so  i built them and put them aside. then i put the design paper on the floor and taped and pinned the silk to it, and then as quickly as i could, outlined the lines with karo sugar syrup. then as quickly as i could, while it was still wet, so it wouldn’t dry onto the paper,  i lay the stretchers down around it and transferred the silk (removing pins) to the stretcher frame. this all went without a hitch until i tried to put the frame back up on the table. at that point, i missed, and the frame fell to the floor, and the wet design came off the clips and hit the table, and folded up into itself and left huge sugar syrup resist marks in places where they shouldn’t. this is why i end up with water all over these designs, because i’m so bad with detail, and just can’t ever achieve perfection.

after getting it all back on the stretcher, i went around and painted in the brown trunks and branches and roots, and the purple snake. it looked pretty sparse, so i took up the karo syrup and put in some extra leaves on the top, and some grass and worms and ants on the bottom. then i painted them in with my dyes. it wasn’t enough, so i drew another syrup line across the top and bottom for a border, and put in blue on top and dark brown on bottom. sky and dirt.

you’ll notice a bulge in the middle of the picture. that’s because i put a tub underneath to raise the level of the central figure, because i didn’t want the water i was about to put on the edges of the silk to run right down and get on the central figure, which i wanted to remain clean and crisp, just as it was.

 the sarong before messing with ithe design

then i got a clean glass of water and took my trush and very quickly ran a brushload of clean water from the edge of the leaves to the edge of the silk. i did this very rapidly, around the entire sarong. i continued the clear water right up to the edge of the central figure, and noticed along the way that there were lots of little dots of dye on the white part of the silk, which looked horrible now that there was water to bring them out.

i thought about this for awhile. obviously i needed to do something to cover or distract from the spoiled parts. i certainly was not going to scrap it and start again. but there’s imperfection, and there’s crap. it’s a fine line sometimes.

i took a brushful of yellow and made a halo around the central figure. the silk was still wet, but starting to dry, so i went around and added a little more water to the edges of the yellow, and the edges of the top and bottom and sides where the dye was moving just fine, but i thought it could go a little more.

  after messing with it

this photo is not very clear, so here are a few details.

 before adding water to the bottom

you can see how clean the lines are, somewhat stark and artless. way too clear for my taste. because it was sugar syrup resist instead of water-based gutta, i wasn’t concerned with the fact that some of the colors bled right thru the lines. when i put on karo syrup, it tends to bead up anyway, which means the lines aren’t entirely connected, and so this is something you can expect. the reason i wasn’t worried was because i was about to ruin the whole thing with clear water anyway.

 after adding water to the bottom

you can see how the dyes flowed into each other. what happens is that the sugar syrup just dissolves into the water, and no longer keeps the dyed areas separate from each other. and they dyes, now wet, run all over the place. which is something i like.

something that i do to hide my mistakes.

 before adding water to the top

likewise on the top, it looked okay, but i wasn’t going to stop with just okay, so i took clear water and brushed it quickly from the tips of the leaves to the edge of the silk, and worked around. 

 after adding water to the top

 this is much better, to my eye. the dyes flowed all over the place, invading the lines, changing the colors, giving the scene texture and depth.

one more thing. i was standing looking at the finished work, and the white part of the central figure looked out of place. now that i had a yellow line around the whole figure, the white part didn’t flow from the outside in anymore, so i needed to do something. so i took some red, and filled it in. i’d already taken my photo, so you won’t see it here. but it looks finished now.

so now it has to sit and cure for awhile without interference from cats, dogs, rain, or houseguests, and tomorrow i can steam it. then it’ll be ready for giving away, and then i have to think about what i’ll do next.

jim has to find two 10′ lengths of wood so i can make makeshift stretchers for my 4′ x 3 yd. veil for asha. and while he’s doing that, perhaps i can work thru a few more nebula handkercheifs. i must show you what i’ve got so far. maybe tomorrow.

dallas is a friend of mine. he’s into irish things, and he’s a member of the society for creative anachronism, and sets up camp in something called pennsic every year for what they call a war and is fought with i don’t know authentic sticks and broadswords. i’ve been promising him this sarong, which he wants to use as a banner for a side business at pennsic, and it’s been years i’ve been promising him this. well, it’s his birthday in a week or two, and i want to have this ready for him. he’ll look so cute wrapped in it.

 pencil sketch on graph paper, traced central figure.

i took the central figure right out of bain’s celtic art book, and made fanciful tree roots and limbs and trunks with snakes according to variations in spacing. i didn’t want a formal celtic border pattern, tho. anything but. it was hard enough to work with color on the central figure.

 enlarged by gridding, black acrylic brushed on.

once i had scaled it up to ful size, something like 21×45 on a sarong that measures 70×45. nice, heavy fabric, too, glad to see it. dharma trading. got out some black acrylic and a brush and drew the pattern in once i was sure of it. it’s a very striking pattern.

 stretched right after putting on resist.

laying the silk down on the dried paper, i outlined all the black lines with clear water-based gutta. it’s just like drawing a coloring book. drawing lines you’lre going to have to color inside of later.

 dyes in egg carton, gutta’d silk ready to paint.

i would like to wash out my dye tray (eggland’s best eggs come in a double set of 12. the eggs are good too) now and then, but i’m always in such a hurry to get to the next project that i never have time to clean it, and just pour more yellow, red, blue and black into one or the other cups. the silk on the stretcher above looks like 2 different colors, but it’s an artifact of the lighting.

 sorry fuzzy, after first dyeing, maybe done.

a hastily taken photo of the finished center figure. the colors turned out completely different from what i had imagined, because i started with green.

i wasn’t thinking, and i colored in the stem in the middle. and then it turned out that by outlining the black lines with gutta, what i was doing was drawing outlines to be filled in later. if i had drawn a single line with the gutta, i would have come out with an entirely different design and a strikingly different color scheme. but now i’ve got green lines outlining everything.

 working on the border drawing, in makeshift studio.

after coloring in the lines on the central figure, i started to draw in the roots and branches, which are going to be much looser. i’m going to do them with sugar syrup, and leave a lot of white space for it to bleed out on, and i’ll use deep, rich browns and greens, and put a lot of leaves on top. or something.

you see in the picture above my latest project, hanging on the wall in back, my current project on the drawing board, and a pile of unironed nebula and other scarves on the bed in front.

 view of tree roots.

getting the over-under problem right is the main thing to making it look okay. there’re usually some rethinking that has to happen, and sometimes a cheat, like 2 unders in a row. it’s best to work in pencil first.

i went down to the studio and got 80′ stretchers, and 48″ stretchers, and i believe i will be able to stretch the entire sarong with them. if so, it’ll stay taught and the results will be good. i was anticipating, and still am with asha’s veil, that i’ll have to use suspension on 2 sides only, and let the middle sag, which will be trouble for letting the dyes flow. so it will be nice to have it properly stretched.

i’m going to have to draw it all at once, probably on the paper on the floor. i’m going to be using sugar syrup, and am going to have to transfer it to the stretchers with some care, lest part of the silk fold over on itself and leave a sticky gooey mess that will really mess up my pattern. i’ll get jim to help me.

that’s tomorrow.

 the only time i’ve used a needle and thread

i figured out about the hanging sleeve.  i’ll use my dad’s suit pant leg, and the waistband of the same suit - handmade in hong kong in the 60s. i’ll sew all the labels i managed to save off all the shirts and skirts lisa gave me to make a quilt with, and i’ll attach the hanging sleeve to the canvas with all the buttons i’ve saved. then i’ll throw out the rest of the ex clothes and cloth strips and collage pieces i didn’t use in the wallhanging that IS NOW HANGING ON THE WALL IN THE SPARE BEDROOM.

yay. now i can strip the table and start drawing a celtic design for a friend of mine’s birthday coming up real soon now. and then the clothes for our family trip. and then i can take a rest. i just bought a bunch of jeans-strength machine sewing needles, and i’m still thinking thru that jeans quilt i saw once and never saw again.

 the second time i’ve used a brush

for the varnish coat i decided i should use a brush, which except for the green and yellow paint on the collage before i cut it into strips. i had to paint over every surface, no matter how small and hidden, with generous helping of gel medium goo, brushing it into nooks and crannies, leaving it built up around really tall pieces of collage strip.

after awhile i was seeing it like long parallel penninsulas, fiords (slartibartfast), and found i was painting gel medium on like it was the tide coming in, marching straight up the inlet until it creamed over the town at the far end.

we went to a place in ireland that was a very long, very deep inlet in connemara. they say submarines come up to port in the little town.

 the only use of image transfer (practically)

i painted a bit of acrylic white paint to represent the house at the head of the bay, which happens to be the hotel we stayed at for my sister’s wedding. i didn’t like how it looked when i cut the collage into strips, so i thought about solutions. and came up with a blowup of the source photo that jim and i took on one of our morning walks, and tore it off the page, and slapped some gel medium onto the surface, and mushed it down over the fabric representing the far hills beneath the mountain. it kind of sticks out as far as color, so maybe i’ll hit it with some acrylic paint, a green glaze, and just leave the white shining out. it was a really nice place. cashel house hotel.

 sticking the collage down to the muslin and canvas

i got farther along in covering the whole front of the canvas with a coat of gloss gel medium. it was pleasing to find that the canvas and collage laminate didn’t stiffen up much at all, and acted very much like a sheet of old leather when i flipped it over. i can live with that. it’ll roll. it’ll unroll. ooh.

 varnishing heavily with gloss gel medium

the only way i had of telling if i’d covered a place before was to cover it again. anything white was still or recently wet. anything that was stuck down didn’t necessarily have a top coat, and the only way to tell was to give it another coat. i may end up giving it another nother coat when it’s had a chance to cure for awhile.

wait until susie sees it.

 it’s up on the wall now, curing

i can already see where i’ve got to stiffen the fabric above the hole of the handing sleeve so it won’t droop over like that. it works well in the photo. i’m not sure how it works in the room. it’s a large room, we’ll see how we take to it.

there’s still so much i can still do. how much i want to attempt, if anything at all (i’m onto other things now that it’s off my table. i’m still doing scarves for susie’s brothers in law (because i love them and would marry either of them, if they were willing to share jim with me), i’m thinking of the next family member to get pregnant and what she gets. things like that.

 the source photo and a range of fabric samples

> On 5/24/08, jeanne
> wrote:
> > hi all. i’m having fun making special gifts for
> > people.
> >
> > this time it’s lisa’s turn. i’ve taken a bunch of
> the
> > family’s old clothes and am turning it into a
> collage
> > of our hotel in cashel.
> >
> > i’m cataloging it in a blog, and i’d like you to
> check
> > in on it from time to time to watch my progress.
> >
> > it’s at www.fabricart.wordpress.com. i hope you
> enjoy it.
> >
> > love, jeanne
> >
> >
> >
> >
>

love, jeanne

— Lisa  wrote:

> Jeanne,
>
> I hope into the site from time to time to see what
> you�ve been up to.
> I’ve not been able to because of how ill I was after
> the tomography.
> It really makes me ill.  And then I’ve been in the
> middle of
> semi-final exams for college and that’s also kept me
> busy.  I’m really
> impressed by your work.  You put an incredible
> amount of time nad
> effort!
> Jeanne, why did you cut it into strips?  Why did you
> decide to glue
> and not sew?  Is this going to make it impossible to
> get down here?
> Why don’t you hold onto it to see when either I get
> up there or that
> Sue gets down here?
>
> Perhaps mailing it really isn’t the best idea!
>
> I’d hate to have all of your work ruined.  Let’s
> talk this thing out
> and decide together the best way to deal withthis.
>
> Lisa
>
>
>
i’m glad you’re visiting, i write it for you and susie
to look at, mainly.

to answer your questions, this is something that
really amuses jim: we go to an opening of his work
from baqck in the 70s, and people come up to him right
and left and want to know what he was thinking when he
painted such and such a picture. and him in his dotage
and the 70s so long ago, how is he supposed to
remember?

mainly why i did one thing over another had to do with
the inspiration of the moment. at every step i was
stumped, and had to think of something to solve
whatever problem it was before i could move on in the
direction suggested by the last step i had taken. so
in a way, when you look backwards, it’s a logical
progression, and i did it the way i did because i had
to.

time and effort
not any more than i put into anything i do. only the
scarves are less than a day to make, and with the
pocket handkercheifs i can do a bunch at a time. when
i made my nebula scarves i just kept making one after
another all day long and now i’ve got most of a dozen
(well, had, i’ve been giving them to people).

strips
i cut it into strips because once i decided to put it
on a background canvas, and once i dyed it and saw how
beautiful it looked, i knew i had to let as much as i
could show. and so i thought i’d make a smallish
collage and glue it on like a frame, with maybe the
bottom part of the frame larger than the top and
sides. and then when i saw the patterns that emerged
from the crackle dyeing technique and saw how
beautifully it echoed the scene i was getting ready to
collage, and realized that i could simply overlay the
same sized collage over the canvas, and the problem
was to figure out how to put down some collage and
leave background spaces between. i could have dome
bits and pieces of collage to help form the overall
pattern i saw on the canvas, but then i got the idea
of how fast the light changed while we were in the bus
travelling around connemara, and how it would be
lovely subtle gray for awhile and then all of a sudden
the sun would come out and there’d be yellows and
browns and greens everywhere, and blue. so i ended up
trying to treat the collage like raindrops, trying to
invoke the suddenly shifting weather, the almost two
states at onceness of the grays to oranges change of
the landscape. who knows whether it’ll actually end up
doing that.

glue and not sew
the glue was because i thought about isolating all
that mold with a varnish, and took it from there. why
not sew was because i really didn’t want to commit
myself to cutting out fussy little pieces, laying them
on and zigzag stitching. i wasn’t confident of my
collage choices, i have never used the zigzag, which
makes a difference subconsciously at this particular
time in my evolution. something. but i get way mot
flexibility about how thick i can make the collage
when i use glue, and it was still going to be flexible
enough to use as a wallhanging.

shipping
the shipping part is going to be an issue. in fact, it
turns out to be one of the most important issues. i
realized lately that the first coat of acrylic gel
medium wasn’t good enough. it was pretty thin, and
when i went to cut the collage up a lot of it came up
from the muslin it had been built on. some fabrics
came away entirely, some didn’t. so i’m having to go
back and slather medium on the strips. so we’ll see.
as for shipping, the strips go diagonal with spaces in
between, so i can roll it diagonally and put it in a
mailing tube. which means i’m not even going to try to
fold it, like i was thinking i’d do for chris (or
sue). now when it leaves this house it has to be a
mailing tube. i’ll include a jar of gel medium so you
can stick down anything that has popped off its base
when it gets there, but it should unroll well when you
get it, and flatten out on its own with a little time,
preferably lying on the floor somewhere. if you turn
it over on its front, you can probably walk over it
like a floor cloth, so it won’t get in the way.

anyway, i’m still having fun, and not getting to any
obstacles and me and jim and my little voice find ways
around.

can i use this letter on my blog?

love
me

 laminated collage strips, upside down

i finished using thick gloss gel medium to glue the fabric strips to the muslin strips beneath. the collage had seprated from its muslin backing even tho the backing stuck to the canvas support well enough. and it’s the synthetic fabrics that seem to adhere the least. i think they might repel acrylic? can’t imagine that much foresight in synthetic fabric design, but there’s the man in the white suit to go by.

now i need to deal with the hanging sleeve issue and varnish it (with gel medium), and then it’s ready to cure for awhile before i try rolling it up and then see what happens to it.

i just listed 5 next steps,

i really love gluing the strips down with my fingers. i have come to realize that i need close contact with my materials. i’m a taurus, i need to be physically grounded to the ground, or i get into trouble. i fall off of bikes, roller skates, roofs, high heels. that’s why i go barefoot all the time.  i would much rather put my art on with my fingers than use a brush or a knife or a sewing machine. if it were safe to ingest paint, i would take mouthfuls and put it on that way. spraying, dripping, splashing, drawing. wouldn’t the tongue make a great brush? try signing your name in the air with your tongue.

 i also used to pour elmers into my palm and let it dry

now that i’ve come to the end stage of this project, and all i can do is make embellishments, i have to think about cutting - tearing the vertical edges, which i didn’t glue all the way out to the edge of the seam. i can cut it and unravel it, slash it like sleet. ooh, i just had a thought. what if i can distress the canvas background to make it seem like sleet or rain, bright, thin little streaks in the same or even the different direction as the strips. metal threads. just only on the background. hmmm. but it’s mostly covered with at least a little (and i got carried away att the end so a lot) of gel medium which is a really good barrier to things like scratching and bleaching. which means maybe i should add a veil to the canvas to make it look rainy.

jim was remarking that once i have it on the wall i’ll be able to see if it needs anything, and then go and paint it on. i haven’t really done any painting for a few years now - i have works on the easels - a watercolor of a neightbor’s front yard, a big koi painting in oil, several unfinished watercolor scenes (with problems) that people want to actually buy from me but which i never get to and would be nice to get them off my list. but i keep getting inspired by other things.

when i finish doing this wallhanging for my sister, i’ve got a friend’s birthday coming up and a sarong design he asked me for a few years ago, and there’s that nebula veil for asha that i really must get to. and there’s my sister’s visit, for which i’m doing wrap-around pants and coverup capes. there, that’s enough to be doing between here and august, isn’t it? i’d say i’m fully booked.

 wet gloss gel medium goes on white, dries clear

 trimmed, pinned, and ready to glue down

i took some of the strips off, more toward the edges. the fabric is readable, and you can still see the background. and then i trimmed off the excess, and pinned everything down so i could scrub away the chalk drawing i had put on the background in order not to lose my place.

the problem was, i had mistakenly used jim’s pastels instead of chalk. pastels have titanium white, which stays, while chalk just turns clear and rubs off when you put a wet washrag on it. so i had to scrub extra hard, and you can still see some white. oh well. i had been debating whether i needed some sort of outline in order for the collage to make sense. i guess i got my problem solved for me. that’s the thing with this process - nothing turns out the way i expected.

but then i was ready to start gluing stuff down. so i did. i got out my gallon tub of gloss gel medium and started dipping fingers full of the stuff and spreading it on the back of each strip, then grabbing both ends and turning it over, placing it carefully down in line with the template marks, which of course i could no longer see well since i’d rubbed them out. i made each strip line up with the last, instead. and this part was relatively quick, and only took 2 days. once everything’s dry, or when i feel like going back to it, i’ll have to use more gel medium and restate the glue on the collage, so that it sticks better. one of the reasons jim thinks the gel medium didn’t stick when i cut the collage into strips is maybe because i thinned the gel medium way down before dipping the fabric into it.

the big problem i’m looking forward to solving is what happens to the glued-down strips in transit? i have good faith that the gel medium i’m using (extra heavy gloss gel medium) will hold the strips on when i hang the thing on the wall. but what happens when i have to roll it to put it into a shipping tube, or god forfend, when i have to fold it in order to fit it into someone’s suitcase? i’m thinking the whole thing will crack and fall off.

the reason i think this is because when i was hacking and cutting thru the collage to make strips out of it, the muslin backing kept popping away from the collaged fabrics on top of it. this is bad. it means that, while the gel medium makes it flexible, it’s not all that flexible. i was already going to include a small jar of gel medium so that lisa could fix anything that popped off, but what happens if it’s a large-scale problem?

so it was a full moon last night, and i can never sleep. i lay there thinking about my collage and the next steps. if the gel medium is not going to hold the strips on under duress, then i’m going to have to find another way to attach them.

the obvious way to attach the strips would be to take the whole thing to the sewing machine and stitch it down like a regular quilt. but not only do i not want to revert to the old tried and true method of attaching one piece of fabric to another, but the fact that i’ve already used a bunch of gel medium means that there’s no way a machine needle will go thru it. and i wouldn’t be able to do it by hand, either, because hand needles are thinner and weaker. i could hardly get silk pins to go thru the collage when i was placing the strips down.

okay. so i can’t sew thru the strips. but i can sew around them. i lay there fantacixing a network of threads, going thru the background canvas and wrapping around each strip, sort of like basket weave with threads. i’d have to use a thick thread, too. so no irridescent threads, no invisible plastic threads, i’d be using carpet thread, and it’d have to be black. i could use netting, and just tack it around each strip. but that would obscure both the background canvas and the collage. more thinking is necessary.

then i thought, well, why don’t i fold and tuck, pleat and draw, while i’m at it? i could basket weave the thread from side to side all up and down the length of the canvas, and then gather parts of it up. or i could pleat it, and make some areas of collage come together in a mass, or make some areas of background come together and hide the collage strips between them. i could fold and bend and gather the thing until it was a shaped piece on the wall, instead of lying flat. depending on what i have to do , the final steps may transform the thing into something unrecognizable. we’ll see.

one thing my fantacizing did was to supply me with a hanging solution. i have to rig a hanging sleeve on the back so that the thing can be mounted to the wall. usually this is done by sewing a 4″ wide piece of cloth all along the top edge of the canvas, and again at its bottom 4″ down. but i don’t want to see the stitches, and i don’t think i can sew thru gel medium.

it so happens i have a few buttons left from cutting the clothing into pieces. i can use strips of cloth instead of one long strip, maybe 4 or 6 4″ strips well-spaced. i can sew them on with buttons that will show on the front of the canvas, and look just like i meant them to be there. so i went thru lisa’s ex-clothing i saved (wow, i did something good), and found a half a pant leg from one of my dad’s old suits that’s almost exactly the right size. i also found the waistband from the same pair of pants, and this waistband has the name of the tailors dad used to go to. so i’m a little torn as to which method to use. but it’ll look great and work well, so it doesn’t matter.

I’ve removed some of the strips, and thinned it way out toward the edges. i wonder if this is better than the other versions. you see, i can’t really tell when i’m standing over the board. but seeing it in pictures really helps to tell what it looks like from a distance.

perhaps what’ll happen is that it’ll resolve into a picture from a distance, and at close range it will look more like the canvas background. at least, i hope that’s how it turns out.

yes, the frigging houseguest from hell is back, and right in the middle of cutting the collage into strips. so jim and i moved the whole shebang upstairs into the spare bedroom, because i can’t go into the studio when he’s here. not only does he mess up my studio something terrible, but i have a pheromone problem with the man, and can’t stand to be in the same room.

so.

before i came upstairs, i started cutting the collage apart using a mat knife. this was very difficult. the mat knife had to go thru a sheet of muslin (piece o’cake) and a layer, or two, of fabric glued down with gel medium (if only i’d known how hard it was going to be). i could cut maybe 4 strips before the knife became too dull and i’d had to switch out the blade. my poor wrists, already damaged from having to lug overweight luggage thru the airport in march (and it’s the middle of june now).

anyway, you can see in the picture above where i’ve got the collage laid out on the floor to the left, and the background canvas is up on the table getting the seams glued down into their final position.

all this went upstairs with me. you should have seen the precautions we took in order not to disturb the cut strips. i just couldn’t imagine trying to put them together again should they have become disordered. fortunately, a layer of plastic underneath and 2 sheets of heavy duty cardboard underneath worked well enough.

so.

here you can see the (dramatically overexposed) strips of cut fabric as i laid them out on the floor, on top of the plastic sheet that served as a template. i left a long strip of muslin for a tail; why i couldn’t have told you at the time. i wasn’t concerned with matching them up.

i noticed right away that the collage seemed to be much bigger than the canvas backing, even tho i used the template drawn from the background to design the collage with. you’d think it’d be the same size. but especially when i cut it up, it turned out much bigger. which is going to be a real problem when i go to stick the strips down on the canvas.

that’s my problem. whenever i do a painting, i go to the edge of the paper and over, never minding the fact that i have to leave a margin so i can frame the thing. i just can’t resist.

i finally reached the end of cutting the collage into strips. i figured out right away that i couldn’t rip the mat knife thru it face up, because of all the folds and crinkles of fabric on the face of it. so i turned the whole thing over and sliced thru it with the mat knife. well, hacked thru it. it was so difficult to do. it took so long. my wrist hurt so bad. so finally i tried a pair of kitchen scissors (no way was i going to use my good fabric scissors, not with gel medium to cut thru - my mom taught  me that. good shears are for fabric and hair, and never to be used for paper or anything else.

it was very problematic cutting thru the collage. the fabric kept coming away from the muslin, even tho it had been glued down with gel medium. so i had all sorts of uneven cuts, and with that knife, having to hack and hack and hack at any doubled-up fabric areas, i cut some pieces into shreds trying to get it separated. it was very frustrating.

even with the scissors, when i got to the knit fabric that made up the furze bushes, with the lace overlay and the thick coat of indian yellow paint on top, i still had to start it with the mat knife, and once i was almost thru the thickness, then go in with the scissors and finish the job. whew.

when i was all done cutting the thing to pieces, i went and took a pencil and numbered each strip along that long tail end i’d left, not knowing why. this was in case the cat and dog had a fight on top of my laid out strips on the floor, at least i cold put everything back together again without driving myself crazy. i cut 103 strips. argh.

the next step was to lay out the background canvas, which of course i had to iron first. i’d already traced the outline of the template onto the fabric with chalk. this means i’m going to have to remove the chalk somehow before i glue the strips down, but i’ll burn that bridge when i come to it.

i took every third or fourth strip, starting with the hotel, which only occurs as a white dab of paint in the middle ground. i laid them out and then had a look. and it doesn’t read this way. there are too few strips of collage over the background canvas, and it’s impossible to tell what the subject is. oops.

so then i added more strips. now it reads okay, but i can’t see the background canvas, and that was the whole point of cutting it into strips.

what now? should i cut the strips down, make them skinnier so they look more like rain? should i take a third of them back off and make the read more obscure but preserve more of the canvas?

i’ll decide tomorrow.

i hate travel. well, i love travel, but it takes me so long to recover that anything i have left unfinished in the studio begins to gather dust. so it’s been half a month since doing anything on lisa’s project.

however, i got back into the studio today. i was still going to do some gluing of green strips for grass shoots, and some green something over the pink fabric representing the furze bush in the middle ground. but i didn’t feel like it at this point.

so i got out some acrylic paint and went to work, unifying the areas with a coat of clear glaze. at least, that was my plan. whenever i take another step in the creation of one of these things, it goes differently than i had anticipated, and that requires another step of creativity to rescue it. or so it seems.

i had thought to put some sort of sap green, or hooker’s green, on the grass foreground, just a light, transparent glaze over everything, not enough to change the existing colors, just to give everything a green cast.

well. the first brushstroke put a dark band of opaque green on the fabric. this was not what i wanted. however, it was down, and now i had to continue. the interesting thing was that my brush only got paint on the raised surface of the fabrics. this is where the fact that i folded and molded everything came in handy. the paint accentuated the folding, and didn’t touch the depths, so i had green splotches all over the fabric. once i got done it didn’t look too bad. it’s not how i pictured it, however.

so i continued. yellow ochre on the mountain and shoreline of the distance, white on the clouds. the white probably had the biggest effect, making the clouds light enough to recede behind the mountain. and the yellow ochre over the mountain brought out some of the jacquard pattern of the dry fabric before i dumped it into the acrylic medium. it had not dried out at all, and by that i mean that the color of the fabric did not go back to its formerly light grayish sheen that made it such a good fabric for the mountain. but with the ochre on it, it finally had some texture, so i was happy enough with it. so i went ahead and put indian yellow on the furze bushes and painted it over the lace in the foreground furze bush.

in the end, i wasn’t so excited about the result, but it did in fact unify the fabrics.

so, on to the next step. more ripping and shredding. with a mat knife.