Harvest

From Sketch to Stitch



My Aurifil thread color palette for my latest series "Field Notes"


Field Notes was born out of several loves, passions of mine:

The love of the prairie.
The love of crops as they rise out of the ground each year.
The love of the symmetry and simplicity of how the fields themselves are arranged in the countryside.


Field Notes in progress on my table.


Some color studies.



Watercolor crayons, water soluble oil pastels, and water soluble graphite on sketchbook paper.

Part One - Black Birds in Trees Harvest


With a round object of your choice (I used a 6" plate) and a soft pencil (HB) draw a circle on your 9x12 sheet of watercolor paper.

 
 
 
Using a texture or geometric stamp, and waterproof ink, add some texture around the circular area.
 
 
Now fill the circle with some yellow paint, I used Folk Arts Medium Yellow.


Using a thin layer of grey paint the background.


The thin layer of paint will allow the background texture to show through; allow paint to dry completely.


Now apply alcohol inks and in random manner.  I spritzed the moon area with butterscotch, lettuce, and red pepper.


Not to worry the inks will dry way lighter than what you see in the image here! 


About half dry now, it will become lighter still!


Once the alcohol inks are dried take a baby wipe and in a swirling motion remove most of the ink from the moon shape on the paper.


This gives you a realistic moon shape and fall harvest coloring.  Not all of the ink will wipe away and this is fine you don't want it all to wipe away.


If you need to amp up the color for the background now is the time to do so.  Here I recharged the alcohol ink using some additional inks and a water bottle.  Spritzing with water will cause speckling, etc., to occur giving you more texture.


Place stencil of choice onto background, and using dry stencil brush techniques push the paint through the stencil onto the paper.  Here I'm using my stencil Black Birds in Tree which is available through StencilGirl Products!


Too much paint will cause the paint to go under the stencil and well creates a HUGE mess, but this piece can and will be redeemed!  Folk Art Paint - Licorice


And because sometimes I am a bit of a perfectionist, yes me, I went and created a second piece the steps of which are above, just to see if I could get the stencil portion correct!


And I managed to keep the paint in the lines this time!  Ok, the paint should be dry now I'm off to add more layers to the first version of this piece to see where it takes me, oh and to cook dinner!

Stay tuned for Part Two!


Redid the studio last night, we moved my sewing table to the west side of the studio space where there was better lighting especially during the daytime, the east side of the studio has a cave like feeling.


Lots of lovely natural light!

Some natural dyed WIP's on my sewing table.



Vineyards in Iowa

John and I went out earlish - for me anyway - this morning to take photos of a vineyard in progress.  Vineyards used to be a mainstay here in Iowa, just like potatoes and mangel beets, but alas sometime in the 60's they went the way of the dodo bird.  Ten years ago, however, the vineyard made a comeback here!  The mark they leave upon the prairiescape is unique, in comparison to corn and soy beans, and thusly my Prairie Harvest series will be including vineyards as part of the imagery!