Friday, February 1, 2013

Creating an object for the Background

Hello Everyone,
Please leave comments for me. It's much more fun to blog if I know people care about reading my blog.
I hope you are all having a wonderful artful day. I spent the morning trying to figure out how to make my Epson scanner work with the new OSX system I downloaded from Apple. A nice young man from Epson walked me through it and now it's fine again. But I digress...
In a previous post I showed you the background fabrics I'll be working with for this quilt on prayer flags. I thought my next step would be to quilt it, but luckily I thought it out more before I began sewing. I realized I want the quilting to go over an object that will be placed onto the background. So I had to paint the object onto fabric first. Remember I wanted an ethereal look, so I experimented with different fabrics.
Here is my end result.

Sun/Moon/Orb
And here is my experiment which involved a bit of serendipity (I love when that happens).
I placed white cotton muslin on my plastic sheet to protect the table. Then I put a piece of voile (a thin fabric on top. Then I put a piece of chiffon (even thinner) on top of that.
I used teal and russet textile paints from Jacquard, white acrylic paint, and yellow ochre Golden Fluid Acrylic paint, and GAC from Golden. I used those brands and types because that is what I already had and I must be frugal these days.
I just started painting on top of the chiffon (the topmost layer) and added water when needed. When I liked the way it looked I separated the layers and let them dry. Here are those results:
the painted muslin
the painted chiffon
the painted voile

I tried using different combinations of these three, but there was too much orange to go well with the background. And then I glanced over at a piece of muslin that I had been using as a wipe rag for awhile to clean my brushes. It had just the right amount of all the colors I wanted. Perfect colors.
the painted wipe rag cut into a sphere
 So I put the painted chiffon on top of it and that is how I got the orb I needed for the sky. So now I can quilt.                                            Please leave comments. My stats are showing there are readers of my blog, but I'm getting lonely here. :)

3 comments:

  1. Hi Regina, I don't always read, but I did stop by today. I know it feels sort of lonely sending your blog posts out into empty space, doesn't it??

    I love how your rag turned into art material - and the colors and textures you are creating are very intriguing. Hope to get a peek at the finished piece soon!

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    1. Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I am getting some nice patterns and the quilt is coming together. The photos don't show the subtle things that are uniting the pieces. I think when the quilting is added and the pieces get flattened by the stitching that the photos will capture it better. I hope to quilt tonight.

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  2. I love the subtle differences in the various materials! What a fun (and insightful) experiment! Thanks so much for sharing your process. I love learning about new techniques and effects.

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