Here is my picture that I am titling Innocence.
If you’ve been following me for any period of time you know that I love working from vintage photographs.
The original photo showed the baby seated on a fur throw that had been placed over a chair. I fell in love with the photo.
I created this piece for an exhibit with the Fibre Art Network called Chromatopia. The rules are that we had to do two 12″ x 12″ pieces and wrap them on canvas. We were provided with 2 paint chips and told that we could only use one colour on each piece.
The green paint chip is an odd shade of green and I couldn’t find a suitable fabric in my stash.
Initially, I did find one piece of fabric that had the right green and I was thrilled!
Until I realized that some yellow showed in spots. I was unlikely to be able to cover that yellow with anything without getting a yellow-green which this colour is not.
Creating the picture.
To improve the lighting in the photo. I edited it in Adobe Photoshop Elements. In the next step, I cropped the photo and enlarged the section that I wanted to use.
I painted some white fabric with some green paint that I found in my stash. I’m not sure when I created that mix of paint but it was perfect!
I then traced the main lines that I wanted onto tracing paper and then pinned it to my fabric sandwich (top green fabric, batting, and backing fabric). As a result, I now had the design ready to stitch on to the fabric.
Next, I stitched through all the layers to create my design and quilt it at the same time.
After quilting, I decided the background was blah, so I carefully lifted the top fabric and placed some lace underneath, pushing it as close to the child’s head as possible.
I then used an Inktense pencil in Hooker’s Green to rub over the lace giving me some texture in the background. I lightly sprayed the background with water to get a more intense colour and blended it slightly with a paintbrush. More shading was added to the baby’s face and gown as well.
It turned out to be a fun project.
Now on to the second piece that will be in yellow-orange. I picked a different photo for that one. I am thinking of hand-stitching it.
Watch for a future post!
Fabric Portraits
This latest piece I’ve just created is different from what I normally do.
Here you can see one of my previous portraits.
This portrait was created for my beginner portrait course – Introduction to Portraits.
And that is the one that I used in my recently published book that is the essence of that course in book form.
Watch for an announcement on a study group to go along with this book.
If you already have the book, you may be interested in checking out the kit that has all the essentials for creating the portrait.