Are You Allowed Do Overs In Art?

     Do you ever look at your art that you made and wish you could have a do over? Sometimes I do. I posted about it here where I redid a couple of my pieces. This past week I worked over another one. When I made this piece, I liked everything about it except the monk never looked quite right to me. Originally, I struggled with choosing a color and a fabric for him. I used a color wheel to choose the color, but he always seemed to stand out too much. This week, I took the quilt to a meeting with some art friends and they agreed. They suggested to change the color of him, perhaps make him smaller, or perhaps make him sitting.

     When I got home, I decided to explore what I wanted the piece to say. I made a mind map. I wrote the title, Contemplation, in the center. Then I wrote words and phrases coming out from the center that came to my mind. These are some of them: meditation, balance, passageway, questions, answers, searching, finding, being open to hidden messages. This process was amazing to me because it made me realize that some of the elements that I had already put into the quilt were telling me a story that I didn't realize was there. All I had to do was make it more clear. Here is the quilt before and how it is now. ( I did a blog post about how I made the sitting man here.)

before

Contemplation (in final form)

I painted veins in the rocks and I couched fibers on the sun to match the patterns in the rocks. They resemble stick figures of creatures and symbolize that nature holds many answers. The patterns of the "bulls eyes" that I put into the ground and sky here and there are the answers that are traveling through the air. The gold "window" in the center symbolizes when a passageway or window opens in the mind when a person is opening up to receiving answers to questions they are seeking. 

     I also redid the shadows. Before, I had embroidered the shadows. While I still like that treatment of the shadows, I think that it didn't work on this quilt. I used Shiva paintstiks to put them on after I painstakingly removed the embroidery.  The last thing I did to modify it was to cut off the yarn edging and put on a pillowcase facing.

     Here's a close up of the sun and the rocks now.

couched with 6 strands of embroidery floss

rocks painted with "creatures"

     So now I'm much happier with Contemplation. I think it delivers its message, the composition is much better, and the symbolism is strong. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts so that the artists know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting.

Star Of Joy

                                      May the Star of Joy shine on you this Holiday Season.

Star of Joy

This art quilt was made by first monoprinting the background with textile paints and lumiere paints on a gelatin plate. Then I printed on top of it with textile paint and lumiere using a wooden roller that I had glued craft foam onto. Then I appliquéd the star and little monk, quilted it, sewed on the borders, and pillow case backing.

roller with foam glued onto it

This method with the roller can be used with PVC pipe or any cylindrical shape.

     I hope next week will turn out as you all hope for you and your families. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on the artists'  posts to let them know you stopped by. Thanks for visiting. 

What To Do With A Piece That Isn't Working?

      Haven’t we all had works that started out with such promise and us with such enthusiasm about them? And then either we’ve overworked them or somehow we just couldn’t get the tone we wanted out of them? Well, that seems to have happened with my latest small piece. It started as just a line study in crinoline. Then I wanted to develop it a little farther into a meditative piece with a Buddha. Since it was a small quilt, I felt I would just work free and easy and see where it went and have fun with it. It was great fun at first, but then I kept making adjustments. I thought I was liking it and when I thought it was done, I realized it wasn’t working out.  So how do I end it so that I’m happy with it?

     Since I last showed you the quilt, I added a fabric piece to the bottom. I had found a teal cotton piece that I had treated with some rusty hardware some time ago. To fit it with this quilt, I added some some texture rubbings with Shiva Paintstiks and left the rough edge of the fabric on the bottom edge. 

rubbing plate, paintstik, brush, palette,
tape to get pain on bottom edge of fabric

And I couched a fiber onto the border of it.  I found some sari silk ribbons and sewed those onto the other edges with the intent of squaring them off but then I liked the pattern of the edges they already had. So for the time being, I’m leaving the edges as they are. And I do love the edges. Funny that I love the fabric piece at the bottom and the sari ribbon shapes more than the actual quilted piece I started with.

     My stitched Buddha wasn’t the greatest. Since the quilt wasn’t looking good to me, I thought that was the problem. So I stitched another Buddha. The Buddha looked much better. Better face, better hand, better foot, but not a better quilt. 

with the new Buddha, couched fiber,
sari ribbon-borders, and bottom fabric

So I removed the Buddha and the squares and pinned a monk from sheer fabric in its place. 

Put a Monk on it!

A little better, but still, I don’t like the quilt as a whole. Next step was to look at the quilt without a monk or a Buddha or squares. 

Sigh (not the title)

It looks empty now.

     The end of this story for me is to put it away for a long time and work on something else. I sure wish I had a design expert on hand to tell me where I went wrong so that I could learn from it, but maybe in the future I’ll figure it out. So for now... Let it go... Let it go... Let it go...

Don't you wish you had a private art expert to guide you? Or would that take away your voice? What do you think? I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please leave comments on their posts to let them know you stopped by.

SAQA Trunk Show

     I finished my piece for SAQA's Trunk Show.  The Trunk Show is literally just that. The quilts get mounted professionally and then put into a trunk and then travel to all sorts of guilds and venues for up to three years. If the artist wants to offer them for sale, they are put up for sale, if not, then they are returned to the artist at the end of the show. They all have to be 10" x 7" and they will premiere at the 2014 SAQA conference in Washington, DC, and then travel all across the United States and around the world. I got to see one of the trunk shows at our art group meeting one month and the quilts we saw were spectacular.
     Here's my contribution:

Resonating with the Universe

If you look back at its beginnings from the impromptu session ( Impromptu ), I ripped out much of the stitching and redid it to place the right elements on top. All of the stitching is done by hand (unusual for me) except for the yarns on the outer edge. Those are machine zigzagged on. (I never know how to spell that.) zig-zagged? zigzagged? zig zagged?  Please comment and correct me on the spelling. The computer spell check accepts all of them.
     I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can visit other art quilt blogs. Please make comments to let the artists know you stopped by.

Impromptu

 Cloth, Paper, Scissors Magazine some time back listed some prompts you could use to spark ideas in creating art. At our last meeting, my art group, ArtsEtc., did an activity in which the leader pulled out prompts from an envelope one by one. After a prompt was called out, we each executed the direction onto our working surface. My surface was a 12 x 12 piece of batting. I brought a collection of fabrics I had made (from gelatin monoprinting), some commercial fabric from   Marcia Derse,  some pearle cottons, embroidery floss, sheers, and 3-D items, needles, and thread. Here are the prompts that were pulled. We were allowed to ignore the ones that we didn’t like. I followed all but #6.

1.) Add a strong diagonal.

2.) Add a trapunto. (I added a stuffed monk.)

3.) Add a repeating shape in several sizes.

4.) Add a doodle.

5.) Add a circle.

6.) Gather.

7.) Add strips.

8.) Add embroidery.

9.) Add a geometric.

10.) Add a sheer.

Since I’m trying to develop a body of work, I brought materials that stick to the colors and themes of that body. The activity took about an hour and a half and lots of talk and laughs.

     After I made it and took it home, I read that  SAQA wants a 10 x 7 piece for a trunk show and I thought the composition of part of it was good enough and if I work on it more and quilt it and embroider it, I can make it into a nice art quilt. So I rearranged some of the elements and cut it to size. (I forgot to take a photo before I did all this. Whoops.) So to get a “before” photo I stuck all the pieces next to each other.Here’s the 12 x 12 piece. 

definitely an impromptu work

Here it is cut to the proper size for the trunk show.

In-process, cut to size

The plan is to add quilting, embroidery and edging and other elements as needed.

I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can visit other art quilt blogs. Please make comments to let the artists know you stopped by.

I'm Getting Attached to My Monk

     At my art group ArtsEtc, we've decided to start each monthly meeting with a quick sketching exercise from a book called "Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun (Lab Series" by Carla Sonheim Amazon.com even though we are basically fiber artists. We only spend about 15 minutes doing it to get our creative juices going. Our sketching leader chooses the exercise and this last time the instruction was to quickly draw 30 cats. I knew I wouldn't have time for details, so I only drew the outline of the cat over and over; no eyes or whiskers or other details. I only had time to get 22 of them on my paper before time was called.
     Then the homework was to choose our favorite drawing we made and to put it on a 5 x 7 cardstock and develop it into a composition and bring it to the next meeting. Here's mine.

Guardian

I used a combination of watercolors, acrylics, Shiva paintstiks (I love those), and a black Sharpie fine point marker.

     The other homework was to bring a photo of a giraffe. Intriguing. In the meantime, I'm monoprinting and texture rubbing fabrics for a couple of quilts I'm preparing.

Contemplation

This is the final version of my quilt. And it is named "Contemplation".  It is 27" x 33". It is the third in the series of my body of work. (The second piece is one I donated to the SAQA auction.)

Contemplation

I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday
where you can visit other art quilt sites and please make comments to let the artists know you stopped by.



















For those of you who haven't been following along or those who want a quick summary, here are quick links to the process of making it:
1.) Creating the background fabrics

2.) Placing the background fabric panels on the batting

3.) Sewing the fabrics in place

4.) Designing the composition

5.) Making fabric for the rocks

6.) Adding more texture to the background

7.) Quilt with not-so-nice shadows

New Quilt Unveiled

I sewed on two yarns for an edge to the monk, rock, sun/moon quilt late last night. I think I have some things that need touched up. I may need to outline the flag with a darker thread, I may need to change the shape of the shadow of the rock cairn (I don't like the shape now), and my physicist husband says the shadow of the monk is at the wrong angle (but I like the way it looks now).  Plus I need a name for the quilt. But here is a photo of how it is now. As you see, I cut off the left side of the quilt, added some mountains, added embroidery, blended areas of the sky, added fabric to the bottom, and other things that I presently am forgetting.

Unnamed

Can you help me name this quilt?

For my next post, I'll show a photo of it all fixed up and links to the past posts showing all the steps of making it. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can see other art quilt blogs. Please comment on their posts so that they know you visited.

Adding Fabrics to The Monk, The Rocks, And The Sun/Moon

     Now that I've chosen a design for my monk/rock cairn quilt using Photoshop Elements, I've moved on to cutting out the monk and rocks from fabrics. I used a commercial piece of fabric for the monk and I've started to hand embroider on it. I used some of the monoprinted fabric I made for the rocks. For the sun/moon, I painted white cotton fabric with a combination of Jacquard Textile, Neopaque, and Dye-na-flow paints as well as some regular acrylic paints.

     I won't show you my final chosen design yet. I've changed it since you last saw it.  But here are some close-up photos as it is now.

Sun/Moon

Partially completed monk

I've machine-stitched across the sky area some and I've hand- embroidered some. I haven't decided how much stitching to add to the rocks so they are still just pinned on.

Rock cairn with flag

I don't know why I'm so attracted to the monk theme lately, but it is really speaking to me. The problem is that there is a call for artists I'm interested in and I want to make a quilt for it that involves a bicycle and a beach. But if I keep with my body of work and this spiritual theme do I put a monk on the bike? Balancing a rock cairn in his hand? (I think not.) I'll figure something out for that entry.

I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find Art Quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let them know you visited.

Ahhh, Back to Making Art.

My art quilt background is still hanging on the design wall. I made a cutout of a monk from brown wrapping paper and took a photo of it. I made a bunch of rock cairns on a table from river rocks and took photos of them. (It was difficult balancing them because they are so slippery and Opus had a blast watching and chasing them as they fell.) And I used a previous photo I had of a circle from a wipe rag. I imported the background photo and all the other photos into Photoshop Elements and began to play with various compositions. Here are some of them in the order I designed them.

1.) Remember; this is only to check for compositional placement. The real thing will look much better because all will be made of fabric with textures and patterns and stitches. You know how much better it all looks once it is sewn and quilted. To me, this one is a bit boring, but it is a start.

large monk, tall cairn, all three items seem to be focal points

2.) This second one has a rock cairn with more interesting shapes. I tried to see how changing the size of the sun/moon would affect focal point since in the one above all three items seemed equal. But I want the cairn to be the focal point (I think) so this doesn't work for me.

better rocks on this one

3.) I made everything smaller on this third one and I like the effect better now. It gives a more expansive view like the monk is looking outward. Getting more like I want it. Oh, how Photoshop helps me see things. I can enlarge and stretch objects out and shrink them out in just a few seconds.

getting the effect closer to what I want

4.) Now, I had to go and really change it up. I flipped the composition over on the background, lightened up the sun/moon. Decisions...decisions.

Flipped composition

So how will I decide? That's the hard part for me. I'm hoping some of you will chime in. I think I'm leaning towards the last one. The monk is in the part that is glowing. Also, the rock cairn is in a part of the base that is almost like a path pointing to it (that's accidental but fits it and seems to lead to the sun/moon).  

Of course, the rocks will be made of fabric and won't resemble the photo rocks you see here.

But now I'm excited to get going.

I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can visit art quilt blogs. Be sure to make comments on their posts to let them know you were there.

Reflection

Well, I got an email that my prayer flag quilt did not get accepted into the exhibit. Even though I am disappointed, I do like the quilt and it has a lot of meaning to me. The whole idea of prayer flags is very spiritual to me and I plan on developing the concept deeper in future quilts. I think this rejection pushes me harder into trying to see what I can create around the concept of prayer flags. Here is a photo of the quilt. I think how I portrayed the monk is a weakness in the composition. I'm not sure what the problem is, but somehow he just doesn't seem to fit in to me. Perhaps I'll take him off or cover him up with something else sometime in the future. The text on the flags and in the background says "Peace on Earth" in many different languages. The name of the quilt is "Spread Peace". Any comments you have would be appreciated.

Spread Peace