Thursday, August 6, 2009

Twin Engines

Full moons always bring a burst of energy and productivity, so this week I've been dividing my time between stitching at home and painting at my city studio.

I'm anchoring each individual seed shape on this 44" x 54" silk habotai print so I can fully stitch it and then add the colored "seeds" inside the "pods". There are 37 vertical rows and I've completed 20 -- after today I'll focus on completing this piece.

On painting/printing days I've been working yet again on tools and techniques to expand and refine my options for language marks.

Scraps of painted fabrics get sacrificed to experimentation. Sometimes I layer one experiment right over another, just to see how the marks and lines interact, but you know by now that I'm fascinated by the layering process and the interactions between the layers. The small, gold-tipped applicator bottles on the right of this picture-- available from Pro Chem-- create wonderful writing lines, but somewhat similar, so I spent part of the day yesterday exploring techniques to expand my options.

See the red lines on this sample? They're straight from the applicator bottle. Now look at the grey and yellow gold lines -- they're way more interesting to me. I'm combining applicator painting with monoprinting in several different ways to accomplish this and I think the results have promise, so it was worth sacrificing this less than successful composition for the sake of "scientific" investigation!

I never liked the red lines on this piece which is why I sacrificed it for sampling, but I may be able to salvage a portion of it for a !2" x 12" stitched, framed piece. I'll try a more deliberate composition with these new techniques today.

No comments:

Post a Comment