Studio Kit

Showing posts with label Mermaid. Show all posts

This may look somewhat familiar. :) I posted it in its original form slightly over a year ago - and the reason you're seeing it again in this updated version is because the curator of the Mermaid show (that "Little Karoo At Night is going to be in) contacted me last week and asked if she could have this one too.

"Yes," I said, "But I need to bring it up to speed!"

Because THIS was the original. Can you believe she even wanted it? lol)

(By the way - check out the difference between my my old Sony point-and-click [which is a pretty great camera for what it is] and my brand-new-last-week-Nikon!)

Before the curator even asked me for it, the fact is, I had already said to myself that it needed more "stuff" in it and could use some improving, so I'm glad I had a reason to do it!

So I got out my new favourite (lutradur), and painted some up! First, I made a fanciful little octopus, and then I made a conch that I'm pretty happy with (!)...

I bumped up the foliage by adding more sea grass and darkening it all up...

Adding some more details to the little sea bushes (I have no idea what those things are called)...

Adding a starfish and some squid....

And hey, do you notice a problem up there in the top right hand corner? Yeah, me too.

After I blocked it again (I had to put on a new backing and sleeve - I had no idea what I was doing when I made the first one!), the purple fish bled. ARGH!

So I applied a little bleach to take up the bleed, which of course turned the quilt into that area into a white island...

So I mixed up some paint and painted over it. Much better even if the green is slightly off.

I completely started over with the mermaid skin/body (the old one didn't even have a face!) and since I had made a young mermaid for Little Karoo, I decided to make this mermaid more mature.

And I gave her a pet/friend to look at!

All in all, much better, no? What do you think?

Now she really IS finished!

If you compare her with the last version, you can see the subtle improvements.

First of all, as you can see, I did make not only her head, but her neck, shoulders and upper torso a little bigger - making her upper body much more proportionate with her tail.

I also darkened the water (again) - because I didn't want it to be quite so cyan blue - I wanted it to be more of a teal blue. But when I did that, the original, darker (and more accurate!) skin colour of my mermaid didn't show up so well, so I needed to lighten her to provide a little more contrast with the water.

Unfortunately, although i was VERY careful removing the mermaid's body from the piece in order to re-do her uppers, the beads became loose, so all my hand-stitching was for naught - I had to sew them all down by machine. Boo!

I also painted over the moonlight with a lavender wash and then a light blue wash, and added some grey-blue ripples, so the moonlight didn't read so unrealistically white.

I also improved upon the rocks, as much as I loved them in their original incarnation, I felt they needed more depth and interest, which I created by adding painted highlights and lowlights - dropping a big, liquid dollop onto the spot and then rubbing it in with my finger.

I also made some subtle improvements to the waterfall, adding shades of blue, grey and lavender and added still another wash of black and then grey on the cliffs, to provide more contrast with the sky (compare with the original HERE.)

The improvements took more than a few hours, but I think the time's been well spent - I really do think she's noticeably improved!

So, she's all done. She has her sleeve, her label, even her bag - and is all ready to go the City Gallery Waterfront Park in Charleston, SC in August.

Did I tell you I'm going too? I'll be there for the grand opening of the show on September 6 - if you're in the area, I'd love to meet you!

Well, she's sort of finished. :) She is finished, in that she has a backing, a hanging sleeve, and a label, but as I looked at these pics that I've posted, I can see that there's some tweaking that needs to happen.

I'll explain as I go along, but let's enjoy it for what it is right now, m'kay? :)

This new and improved sky, you 've already seen, I am in fact, really pleased with that sky. I think it looks like night, I like the highlighting on the edges of the cliff of the moonlight, and I really like the colours in the sky.

And off to the left you see the waterfall - got a little 3D effect with the fluffy stuff and I like that a lot - but I think I need a little work on it to give it some more dimension. And I like the quilting on the rocks - if you click on that pic to see it bigger, you'll see it.

I like the water too - my twice quilted water - I first did wavy swoopy lines, and then decided it needed some more definition so I did some straight line quilting. but I think the moon's reflection is a little too white - I think a wash is in order there - but I don't know whether to make it sort of gray, sort of blue, or sort or lavender. I need to have a think on it, but it needs a little something.

Similarly, I like the rocks, but I think there's a little bit of a flat effect happening. Not that it's "flat" in a 3 dimensional way - I do like very much that these rocks bring the eye forward and help to show that the cliff rocks are in the *background* not the foreground - but I think they're just sitting there doing nothing you know?

Not that rocks *do* a lot, but they're not doing much for this piece. Maybe the addition of some fuzzy moss - but not TOO fuzzy - perhaps a little moonlight glittering on the wet? That kind of thing.

And Ms. Mermaid. Although I love her tail and body shape, I don't like her skin. Despite the fact that I used 3 shades of coppery brown and added a little gold-mixed-with-burnt-sienna to give her a bit of a glow - it's still quite flat looking.

The legends of the mermaid at Little Karoo talk about her 'rosy cheeks" and I've certainly got that down, and I love, love, LOVE her hair (made from braided embroidery floss and sewn down), but her lips are too pink and her eyes seem to be looking in a different directions, and I think her head's too small!!! lol

So I need to re-do her face, too.

But despite all those "complaints", I'm pretty happy with her. Just a few little tweaks and she'll be good to go.

I'm going to take a break from her for a little while though - she's not due until July 23 - and I need to step away for a bit.

Something new next week!

So, remember when I said that I thought I was going to have to add some washes to make my night time scene less "early morning" and more "night"?

Well, "Ta Dah!!!" :)

I started out with blobs of blue, black and red to make a purple wash...

...which looked sort of an eggplant-y once it was all stirred up. Even when I added the water, it still looked very dark, but when I tested it on the side, it looked like...

The bottom wash, which I figured was too dark.

So I added some more water in increments of about a 1/4 of a cup, and got the second version (above it) and then again (the very top version) which was my target colour.

After the first, wash, I had this. Better, but still not dark enough.

So I added colour directly to my wash, first a little blob of navy blue, and then added two more washes with more additions of navy blue...

and then added more black to the mixture and did two or three washes of the black. When I started getting into the navy blues and blacks, I was adding washes to the pond water as well, to darken it up.

And this was the end result.

No, right?

The water looks great, and it's certainly dark enough, but there's hardly any differentiation between the sky and the rocks.

So I got out those original teals, blue-y greens and purples I started with, darkened them up with the additions of a drop or two of black and a drop or two of Prussian blue...

And that's what I ended up with. Much better, no?

So, if you look at where it started, you can see that it's a big difference, and it doesn't look like morning or an overcast day anymore. Now, it actually looks like night. Yay!

You can see the progress side by side here (that pic is clickable if you want to look at it in a bigger size) - those four pictures represent 15-20 washes in total!

I'm totally in the home stretch now, I have probably only two or at the most three hours left on the piece. Phew!

Come on back on Friday for the big finish!

P.S. - It's Wednesday, so I'm linking up with the Needle And Thread Network - please check out what other Canadian fiber bloggers are up to!

I had hoped to show you a finished piece today, but I grossly underestimated how long it would take me to braid enough embroidery floss to make the mermaid's hair - not to mention, some of the hand quilting I've done hasn't turned out so well, so I need to re-do it. :SIGH:

But I DID make some rocks. I knew I knew how to do it, and I thought if I pulled out By The Sea from last year, just looking at those rocks would remind me how I did it. That didn't work - I pulled them out, petted them, and thought "how pretty", but couldn't remember how I did them, exactly.

Bu then I found and read my own instructions on how to make them (gee, I'm glad that this is a process blog!), except, this time, I broadened the colours of roving that I used, and put them on a gray silk background, rather than stablizer and pinned 'em all up.

Since I didn't have very much of that grey scrim left, I inserted into my rocks for more texture instead.

Once I had it all pinned down, I needle felted it.

And when I was done, I had this piece of fabric. It was sooooooooo SOFT, I just wanted to pet it like a bunny. :) Alas, I needed to cut it up...

...into rock shapes.

Which I put onto some fabric I wouldn't use for much else (a heavy cotton upholstery fabric sample I was gifted by a friend - said friend gave me banker's box full of such samples and they've come in very handy in a lot of applications.

There's a lot of that stuff in the "America Now" series, for instance. Painting them over covers a multitude of sins!)

But back to this piece, my rocks needed to be on that background, because I wanted to quilt them before I put them on my painted background.

So, we're getting closer!

I have to finish braiding Ms. Mermaid's hair and fix up my hand quilted elements - and though I've added the washes I talked about last week to take my background from early morning to the night I intended, I think I have to add two more washes of purple and blue (and maybe teal) to the sky to further differentiate it from the cliff.

But, we're in the home stretch now! Finished piece on Wednesday or maybe Friday.

Until then...

I was just being tongue in cheek, but how cool would it be to write a story about a mermaid and illustrate it with quilts?

But back to our current tale...there's not much to say, except that what you're looking at right there are hundreds of sequins and about 30 hours of hand beading - I'm sure someone else would be faster at it, but it took me quite awhile to figure out a: how to do it and b: how to do it in a way that worked!

These are the beads that auditioned for the piece,

And these are the ones I used.

Originally I was going to hand-cut her scales and sew them down, and then I had this "brilliant" idea that it would somehow be faster to make her scales beads. I laugh, laugh at myself.

That said, I do like the effect.

And this is the drawing that I started out with.

Also, remember this:

that I did just about a year ago? I did it AGAIN while I was quilting the background -hence the switch to beading the mermaid.

Only this time, it was a 70/10 rather than a 14/90, and it was just at the tip; so no hospital visit was necessary - after a short, intense argument I managed to convince BSP to pull it out with a pair of pliers (this time, is was just straight in rather than curved through) and I've had no ill effects. Be careful out there! ;)

See you on Monday with some rocks - and maybe the finished piece!

It was Canada Day yesterday, so I was golfing and generally celebrating being Canadian and forgot it was Monday and that I was supposed to post!

So, the background is done now - as you can see, from when I left you last, I've added foliage and the pond. This is the background in it's "finished" state (I'll be adding quilted elements to the background and foreground later), but I thought I was already finished earlier.

You see, this little section originally looked like this. And, don't you think it looks like there's a wee tsunami happening on that shore?

So, I painted it out ...

...waited until it dried,added in some more rocks, waited until they dried, and then added some more trees and bushes.

And this is what it looks like now. I think the background's done, but I may end up adding some washes of blue to make the sky darker - we'll see once I've quilted the background and added some quilted elements.

Anyway - stay tuned... more on Friday! And for my American friends, enjoy your holiday tomorrow!

* and linking up with WIP Wednesday at the Needle and Thread Network. Go and have a look at what other Canadian fiber bloggers are up to!