1/10/11

A Winter Seat

It's a beautiful snowy day here in Michigan. While I'm enjoying the view from my new studio space, there is nothing particularly remarkable. Out on the deck, the snow made a pretty little mound on my iron chairs and I snapped a photo to capture that. But you can see that the background is less than pleasing. In order to create art from this view, here's what I did.

First I turned off the color, resulting in black and white photo. Then I ramped up the contrast on the photo to highlight the important parts. Using the bucket feature Paint.net (a free program), I easily erased the lines I didn't want to appear in the final artwork. I just replaced them with white.

Next, I printed the photo out on watercolor paper I'd prepared with Golden digital ground. I used the digital ground to keep the inkjet ink from running when I painted it. I painted the printed image with watercolors and threadsketched the lines with black thread on the sewing machine. That's the third photo. Finally, I scanned the watercolor painting and printed it out on commercial inkjet prepared fabric. Then I used some textile paints to bump the color back up on the fabric version.



I added batting behind the little fabric piece (8x10) and threadsketched again with black thread to turn it into a quilt. Now I'm working on adding some fun embroidery with simple stitches. I may add some beads. When I'm done, I'll finish the edges and have a small quilt to remind me of this brilliant day in January and the winter seat full of fluffy snow.

9 comments:

  1. Great to see your process, Kelli!

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  2. This is beautiful! And thank you for mentioning the digital ground - I'd never heard of that, but it sounds great.

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  3. You make it sound so easy - each step would take me ages - but I really love the finished result - and all the stages in between come to that!

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  4. This is really cool! Thank you for responding to my plea this morning. I love to take pictures and have been looking for a way to incorporate it into my art. I am really new at this and I am trying to experiment. I have not heard of digital grounding before. I will have to check this out. I don't really have a group or a person to learn from but I have plenty of good books and dvd's. This will be my year of experimentation. Thank you for sharing.

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  5. I don't know whether to be inspired or depressed! Ha-ha! You really DO make it seem so easy, but it sounds like so much work. Please keep cranking 'em out, though, cuz I LOVE LOVE LOVE seeing them!!! XOXO, Donna :)

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  6. Anonymous1/11/2011

    What a helpful tutorial - found you on the Sketchbook Challenge and so glad I did. Thankyou.

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  7. This is really interesting and I'm going to try out some of your ideas. Thank you for explaining so well! I'm wanting to try out some new 'stuff' but don't know about anything except fabric, so unless I meet someone like you, its just a lit of swearing and frustration that happens!

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  8. I find swearing to be most useful, although the cat looks at me like I'm distasteful to her sensibilities. I'll take a better photo of the finished quiltie, as that one's not very good. It's looking quite charming...

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  9. It's beautiful and love the colors!!! thank you for sharing the "how-to".

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