April already!

I have been busy the last week or so.
I managed to get to the first day of the AQC and saw some lovely works.

One of my favourites was in the Korean Style Quilt section. I love the design, reminding me of looking down at a city from a height.

Kayoing Ahn.

Once again, the ladies who develop their quilts from collages were there. Collage to Stitch. I am very interested in this technique but find that you can't just sit down and make good collages - more practice needed, therefore more organisation and space needed.

I made a small piece for the Self Portrait exhibition. The quilts had to be 25cm x 25cm, not very big.

I had a piece mostly made from years ago.
I have been doing some blind contour drawing of faces.
I also saw some lovely blind contour wire portraits while I was overseas. Both mentioned in this post.

So I did a blind drawing of myself, including torso. I sewed it onto soluble fabric and attached it to the base. Then I put the borders on and entered it. I was very chuffed to be accepted and see it on display in person.

It is titled Hollowed Out.
The statement is: Sometimes following the rules is too exhausting.

February 2019

I used to aim for a post a week. Now I am for one a month! I want to continue because this really is my visual diary, I often come back to it to find out things. I think that is because the blog is searchable, which my actual, physical, visual diaries are not!
Also, as I change themes in my musing, I find that I will take things from an old visual diary, on a totally different topic, and reuse them. That is definitely not searchable in the hardcopy version.

So I will continue with the occasional post, which is mostly for me.

My tree is finally finished and mounted. I went to my tapestry weaving group today and finished sewing the back on (no relation to tapestry weaving whatsoever, but we do talk tapestry, tapestry exhibitions, themes, etc. while doing knitting, sewing, etc. - looms are a bother to take with you unless you are doing a very small, portable tapestry).

I took a couple of pictures when I got home, in two different locations. The difference in lighting is quite marked.  

This is the tree, after the acorn has sprouted (not really, of course, I couldn't wait the 100 years or so.  It is actually the tree and the acorn grew under it.)

It has been a hottish summer, not as bad as other parts of Victoria, and other parts of Australia, but I have found the weather challenging enough anyway.  So it has been a bit hard to be motivated. But I was with some young relatives recently and one of them remembered that I had taken a book about how to draw with me last year (Drawing for Mixed Media Artists by Carla Sonheim). One of the suggestions was to draw with your eyes closed. Another was to draw with your non-dominant hand. She combined these and drew a picture left-handed and with her eyes closed. Unfortunately it was on a whiteboard and she rubbed it off before I could take a photo. But she did do a couple of others. I managed to get a quick photo of them before she rubbed them out.

This inspired me to have a go myself! This is partly because there is a challenge for the AQC, due at on February 21st. I am not necessarily going to make it for that (it is a short time frame) but it is a theme to get me going. I think I need themes to motivate me, at least at present.

Part of the reason why I am thinking that my drawing is ok is that I was visiting a friend who lives in New York (lucky me) and went to a restaurant at Colombus Circle that had a whole lot of wire art, portraits. So the current thinking is to try to use that idea with the abstract drawing I have done and see what develops.

I haven't worked out quite how I will do it but the idea is giving me something to think about.

Self Portrait sewing

As part of our last assignment, we had to elect to work on a portrait, a landscape or a still life.  I thought I would challenge myself with the portrait - and it was definitely a challenge!!
I tried drawing and collaging an image but wasn't particularly happy with what I had come up with.  Nothing looked particularly human, let alone like me.
So I tried a different approach.
I started by taking photo of myself, using the computer.  This was a 2.00am, when I couldn't sleep - I thought I might as well get up and be doing something.  I got good shadows as I hadn't turned on many lights.
Then I tried some effects in the photo programme but they weren't particularly great.  So I exported them to photoshop and played around a bit more, trying to get some value areas to work with.

I then used this to play around with the first part of our assignment which was to paint Vliesofix and iron it onto fabric as a background.        

                                                
I painted the Vliesofix according to the areas of darkness, etc.  I used fabric paints - I had tried some old, very old, silk paints but they tend to stay on the backing paper more than the gluey part.  Fabric paint works much better.
It is reversed because I traced it. It was relatively dark when wet but dried much lighter.

Then I used Photoshop to draw around the photo and get a line drawing.
I traced that onto the backing paper and sewed it.

One has just machine embroidery thread, the other has Australian Tapestry Workshop wool in the bobbin.  I prefer the sewing thread one, it is more subtle.
A friend saw the finished piece and thought it looked like I have the evil eye - such is life when you don't like drawing.