How Do You Start A Series?

     Have you ever decided to start a series of art quilts or other types of art media? I so much enjoyed making my last composition and was pleased with the result (even though I haven't yet finished it), that I've decided to try a series based on the images in it. Rather than just get going making one piece after another with those images, I decided to think about why I liked the composition so much.

The Puppeteer

     One of the reasons is that the images had deeper meaning to me. The fossil ammonite symbolizes several things. It stands for cycles, antiquity, and messages, just to name a few. And the image of the girl (besides being my dear niece) symbolizes one who is on a journey to discover, to make change, and to become changed. So I decided to focus first on the words and a good way to start my series would be to make a mind map of the words. Choose a word that is central to the theme and then start free associating words that branch off of that main word. Once I did that on a scrap piece of paper, I had the idea to make it more artistic to make it more inspiring to me.
     I got out my sketchbook and drew out a fossil ammonite in the center with a gel pen and wrote the main word with an Inktense pencil on top of it. Then I wrote out the other words in other colors with Inktense pencils. After I had that part finished, I decided to add the other image to the sketchbook page of my niece and add words that pertained to her and noticed that there is some overlap between ideas of the two images. As time goes on, I'll probably add more words and images.

mind map

     The plan is that the mind map will help me design my series and spark ideas to provide deeper meaning to each art quilt that I make in the series.
I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let the artists know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Have You Ever Surprised Yourself With A Composition?

     Have you ever just gone into the studio to play with something quick and ended up with a composition that you liked so much that you might use it start a series? Well, I made a sketch the other day of a fossil and decided to make a small fabric interpretation of it. The first thing to do was to choose a background for it. As I learned in my recent class that I blogged about here, the fossil needed to rest on something. I decided to choose the shape in a shape background. So I got out some fabrics and cut out some rectangles and placed them on top of some dyed cheesecloth.

fabrics on cheesecloth on top of white crinoline

Then I thought it might need more, so I tried this combination.

Another possibility

I decided I didn't like the piece that was separated from the others. Then I hand stitched the pieces of fabric onto the cheesecloth and crinoline. Next,  I sketched my fossil onto the back with pencil and free-motion sewed it with black thread from the back.

Interpretation of fossil sketch on fabric 12x12

     After looking at it for awhile, I felt something needed to be added. So I turned it over and was going to add a bird to it on the orange-red rectangle so that the bird was looking downward towards the fossil. But, I had a photo of my two nieces from when they were toddlers sitting on a rock that I was going to do a series on in fabric and I got the idea instead to do this.

The Puppeteer

I removed part of the rectangle and put one of my nieces on top. She was playing with sticks so I got the idea to make it look like she is manipulating the fossil. The piece is still in process. I like all the raw edges. I'm not sure how I want to finish it. But how it evolved was fun and very intuitive. I can see making a larger quilt with this theme and then some other ones building off of this idea. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let them know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.