More K Street Reflections

Another Photo, slightly skewed but almost an abstract image, left alone. I wanted to have at least 4 in this series of 8 by 8's.

Cropping the photo I found the area I wanted to embroider.

Trying to straighten the image I embroidered almost the exact scene I was seeing. Again, these embroidered images are all thread on canvas.

This photograph has been cropped from a larger view of these windows to find the exact area I wanted to embroider.

This is the result of the free-motion machine embroidery. I will show the full series of four when I have had them photographed together.


I am stopping this series or theme for now and moving on to painting some of the 8 by 8's., but I am fascinated by reflections and may return to do some from pictures taken on a sunny day.

Reflections on K Street

An interesting bit of information is that all the buildings on K Street are contemporary and all the same height. This is because no building in DC may be taller than the Capital.
I walked along 4 blocks of K street recently on a cloudy winter day and using my camera shot pictures of the reflections in windows.  My camera was pointing up as I wanted only clear images, free of signs, etc.

From this photograph, above, I embroidered two 8 by 8's.
This one has a blue cast and easily shows the part of the reflection I was viewing.

This shows another part of that original photo but has a slightly different coloration. These 'Reflections on K Street' are part of the 80 I am still working on. Each was created with free motion machine embroidery on heavy canvas and mounted on 1 1/2 inch deep canvas stretchers,

Old Slides

I am looking at part of the my past on the last day of 2011.
How many old slides does everyone have? I have hundreds of slides of past work that have not been digitally photographed. My granddaughter, Alex, took a lot of them to convert and give me a disc or two or more of my old work.
Just looking at the amount of slides I have becomes a daunting task.

Seeing some of this work, once again, surprises me, in many ways, some good and some I'd like to forget. I remember that this was a commission for the Food and Drug Law Institute. They wanted a bright wall hanging reminiscent of Washington D.C. for a long narrow gray hall.

The title is Capital Seasons. Behind each of the seasonal trees is a silhouette of some of the more well known building in D.C.
To get an 'on site' photograph, a good friend and photographer, Andrea Uravitch, came with me to see it. The hall was so long and narrow it was impossible to get a full front picture so we have these angled views from each end.
The commission was 4 panels with the total size of 2 feet high by 12 feet long.

Happy Holidays

To celebrate this holiday season I am adding a couple of drawings of poinsettias. Each was drawn a different year with a different poinsettia.

I love to have a poinsettia each holiday season and here from another year is another drawing.
I just read that the yellow center is the flower and the red petals are really the leaves. So what are the green things under the red leaves?

When I used my drawing as the source image for an embroidered poinsettia, it becomes  much brighter. I had use colored pencils for my drawings and they can be pale compared to some bright colors of thread. This embroidery was appliqued to a piece of an unfinished wall hanging.

And this year I have two small and one large poinsettia decorating my red table in the dining room. Will I draw this large one?

Add a little RED to your lives this holiday season and have a wonderful New Year not in the red.

Desert Wild Flowers, 8 by 8's

I have been slow to add to this blog due to many factors. There are times when life seems to take over and all the days are filled.

My photographer had these pictures ready and I was able to pick them up last week. I had mentioned them briefly in October before I had them all photographed.

This detail is of the Tansy Leaf Sun-Cup. These eight are from pictures I took in the high desert along the Sierras from Nevada into California.

I used the photographs, printed on a heavy fabric, as background for the embroidered flowers. Many of these wild flowers are so very small they are hard to see clearly, so I enlarged them when doing the embroidery. Then I placed (appliqued) them onto their original background photographed fabric.

These 'Pussy Paws' are close to their actual size in relation to their background. Those are dried pine needles that cover the ground.

Since finishing these I have completed my black and white series and will add those pictures as soon as I am able to pick them up from my photographer.

The 8 Black and White group brings the total to 51,  8 by 8's,  finished. Not many to go but I tend to slow down during our holiday season.
Happy holidays, everyone.......
Here's to a creative and fulfilled New Year!

Spelling

No matter how many times I go over and reread to correct what is written, there is always a misspelling.
It should read PREVIEW, not preveiw.

Black and white 8 by 8's

At long last I am working again on the 80, 8 by 8's. As you can see this series will be all black and white and there will be 8 in the group. Here, some of the fabrics I may be using.

And tangled on the table, some of the trims that I may add to the compositions. I always pull more out  than I need or end up using.

Hard to see but I have begun and there are several small blocks laying on top of each other. I like to amuse and confuse.

There are many choices of fabric I will use as background or lining for the abstract appliqued and pieced tops.

And last my machine is set up to work even if I am off doing some of the cooking for Thanksgiving.

I hope this preveiw will bring you back to see the finished series which will be completed after Thanksgiving.

With these 8 there will then be 51 completed.........
working toward the final 80.

8 by 8's, Deco series

This 8 by 8 group titled DECO was created entirely on my old commercial sewing machine. The background of each section consists of various colored cotton fabrics pieced and appliqued. One can barely see the background composition through the rows of stitched threads. The surface embroidery is almost entirely satin stitch in varying widths. I prefer working on my commercial machine for this type of work as it can smoothly  satin stitch up to almost one-half inch wide. Below is a detail showing just one of the 8 by 8 inch squares.

Quiet Beach

A 15 minute sketch of a lonesome beach using the Colored Pencil App on my iPad. No surfers and no one playing on the sand. This was a gray day with an overcast sky reflecting back on the ocean. Torrance Beach, better known as the Hollywood Riviera, runs between Redondo Beach and the Palos Verdes Peninsula seen on the far left. It was a quiet ocean that day with breakers that were slowly rolling in and about 65 degrees. This is the kind of beach I enjoy walking along where you can just enjoy the ocean smell, the sound and color of the water and a few sea gulls but no people crowding the sand.
Home again and now back to the 8 by 8's.

Desert Wild Flowers, 8 by 8

Time flies when you are having fun or busy with embroidery. The 8 desert wild flowers have taken the last couple of months to turn into 8 by 8 inch embroiderd quilts. These have not yet been photographed to show as a group but I took a few pictures of individual ones to see the problems that may have developed.
Therefore, these three have not had a professional photograph, yet, but are being added to the blog before leaving for California.

These fuzzy 1/2 to 1 1/2 inch Pussy Paws consists of many tiny flowers, each having 4 petals. They grow in groups with long extending bright pink stems.

These cupped bright yellow flowers are Tansy Leaf Sun-Cup and can be 1 to 2 inches across.

All these wild flowers have been embroidered free-motion on the sewing machine and the images taken from pictures I took while on a bird watching tour in the high desert of the Eastern Sierra Mountains in both Nevada and California.

This last wild flower is Torrey's Monkey Flower.
I hope some desert wild flower expert will let me know if I have the names of each flower correctly written. I referenced the names from my book; Wildflowers of the Eastern Sierra by Laird R. Blackwell. It was difficut at times to connect my photographs with the photos and names in the book.

My book states that these Monkey Flowers are moderately large, 1/2 inch across. Many of the wild flowers are so tiny I needed an expert who was with us to help me see them all. The desert seems to hide so many beautiful wild flowers and it was a privelege to have someone point them out as we explored during this trip.

Drawings and embroidery

Letting a week go by before adding to my blog, one would expect to see much new work. However, working on the 8 by 8 inch pieces has slowed while creating a series of 8 desert wild flowers.

In the meantime I adding three 8 by 8's of non-wild flowers to the group of 80. Each of these embroideries first started as a colored pencil drawing/painting on paper.

Seeing this month's Artist magazine featuring roses stimulated me to show my drawing of this rose.

I broke off a branch of the someone's Tulip tree while I was walking in our neighborhood in the Spring. I brought it home and drew this version immediately as they seem to die quickly.

One year, at Christmas, a friend gave me an amaryllis bulb. I drew it several times as it was opening into this gorgeous large blossom.

These three embroideries are the result of creating the three drawings with thread. Each embroidery was stitched with free-motion machine embroidery on a dissolvable stabilizer and then applied to a painted background. I added faint pen and ink drawings behind each embroidery.

Just 40 to go to make the 80  8 by 8 inch art works.

Taiwan Craft Exhibition

This is one of the posters that will hang outside the USA Pavilion during the Taipei World Design Expo 2011 International Design Exhibition from September 30 till October 30, 2011. Fifteen artists from the USA will be represent the various carft media. 2011 marks the centennial of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the government designated 2011 as 'Taiwan Design Year'. Komelia Okim curated and organized the USA Pavilion. The other craftsmen and artists invited are: Andrea Uravitch, Kevin A. Hluch, John Littleton and Kate Vogel, Laura Peery, Joyce J. Scott, James Malenda, Namu Cho, Jinja Kim, Marilyn da Silva, Jack da Silva, Robert Ebendorf, Helen Shirk, and PauletteMeyers. The 15 artists were chosen for this "Crossover: Symbiosis of Craft and Design" theme for their unique individual characteristics and professional qualities. They pursue their careers in different places: California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington, DC. The other countries participating include Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, and Thailand.

The above information was given to us at the press conference last Friday. We were also given gifts of porcelein bottles from Taiwan. The piece above in the poster, Not Always Green, is one of the artworks I will have at the exhibition. The second one  viewed will also be there.....Variations on 'T', as will this third hanging, The View From Ginny's Barn.

Walls

My 8 by 8 series has been added to and I have some pictures from my photograher, PRS Ass., Kensington, MD. This series of 5 has the theme of walls.  All the reference pictures I have taken while traveling. From the left, the first with a door was taken at the Cappezano wine and olive oil estate in Tuscany. Next is a wall, I saw wahile walking down the street in NY, then a wall and door at a tiny village shop in Tuscany, another from NY on 23rd street and the fifth is from a wall in a shop called Stitch in Raleigh, NC.

This group of 6,  8 by 8's, is solid embroidery or thread painted as was the series above ( I am using up a lot of thread). These birds were all photographed on an Elderhostel Bird Watching tour my husband and I took in 2009. The area of the tour was up and down the eastern Sierra Mountains from Nevada and into Califonia, from the desert area east of Lake Tahoe winding through the foothills to Yosemite and Mono Lake and back again.

Thebirds are, clockwise from the upper left,  An Eared Grebe, American Goldfinch with summer coloring, Wilson's Phalarope, Gray Crowned Rosy-Finch, Yellow Headed Black Bird, and the California Quail.

This is a detail of the Gray Crowned Rosy-Finch. Most all of the birds I had embroidered into the Wing Chair series (previously pictured here) were also taken from that same Bird Watching tour. I had no interest of becoming a bird watcher but did benefit from going on that tour. I also took many pictures of the wild flowers in bloom on the eastern Sierra Desert and will be using them in future 8 by 8 inch artworks.

iPad2 LiveSketch App.

After waiting two weeks to show the results of this art application, I finally decided to go ahead and discuss my reactions to it. LiveSketch HD is this week's App for my iPad. This first picture is a sample of a few trials, just to demonstrate the way the marks react to one another. There is one mark making tool but several backgrounds and any color marker you wanted. This sample shows that it is impossible to put two lines, whether parallel or curved, close together without an automatic sketchy filling. This makes it difficult to create simple marks unless they are far apart.

One thing I do appreciate are two of the backgrounds that are included. This one has a graph paper appearance. Using a sketch I had created in a sketch book in Hawaii, I tried to copy it on the graph paper. Whenever the marks were close together a filling of color, here a dark brown, took place. Sometimes this works well as on the banana, but not when trying to draw tiny circles on the center of the flower.

I really like this background that looks like old parchment. On this tree I tried different colors for the marker tool. I still found it difficult to make small marks close together as the automatic fill took place. I was not able to draw tiny branches close together. I discovered that if you draw a line quickly it is pale and thin. If you draw a line slowly it is darker and a little bit heavier.

Using the graph paper background again I put a few spools of thread on my desk and started to draw them. There were advantages to that automatic fill in some places and I think if one practiced enough to be able to control it, it may be useful. There is an eraser but it is very wide and a bit harder for me to control.

Each of these pictures is shown exactly as it came from my iPad. Some should be cropped but I wanted to have the exact proportion of the iPad screen shown.

Although you could put any color background on before starting to draw I really like the old look so started the rose on it. Having the use of just one marking tool with no sizes and one eraser with a wide size, this drawing App is harder to control. I found it odd that so many backgrounds and colors for the drawing tool are available yet just one tool with one size. It truly is a pencil sketching App in the real sense.

In this last picture I again used the parchment background and brown for the marker. This again shows how there is a fill when trying to draw small spaces like the areas between the wires on the fence. I tried to write Barbed Wire at the bottom but the fill gets in the way.

 This is an interesting App to use, although frustrating for me. There are some fine examples of art work created with LiveSketch, in the Apple Store web site, that pros have created and some good recommendations for it.

More eight by eights.

For the past year, I have been looking at the photos, of many pairs of shoes, I took when our granddaughter, Lindsey, and her shoes, stayed with us. Since I have been enjoying working with colored pencils for a while I decided to make a few pairs of these beautiful shoes important by drawing each on its own 8 by 8 inch canvas.

Each pair of shoes was drawn on heavy drawing paper, either a white or buff color, and then adhered to the painted framed canvas. Each had a different texture, satin, silk, suede and leather amd together were a delight to see being worn each day.

While in Spain a couple of years ago we stayed at Posada De San Jose in Cuenca. This had been a monastery and was converted to an inn, built almost over a cliff. It was a cold day and I stood down at the end of a narrow alley facing the front of the Inn where all I could see was the entrance and drew it in a 5 by 8 inch sketch book.

This year I machine embroidered it on lutradur that measures 16 inches high by 8 inches wide. It has now been cut apart and is on two 8 by 8's canvas forms that are hung vertically close together.

The 8 by 8's are continuing to be various mediums and several different themes and there are many different ideas, to complete the necessary 80, yet to be hatched.

MAKING A MARK: 7th August 2011 - Who's made a mark this week?

MAKING A MARK: 7th August 2011 - Who's made a mark this week?
So much useful and interesting information on this blog, one could spend the entire day learning and enjoying.

Paper Camera, iPad App

This week I am not showing what I consider an Art Application for the iPad. A good friend told me about this App, called Paper Camera based on an entertainment category. However, I can see possible ways to use it with drawings or paintings. 

This first picture is one I took with my camera of a single gazania in a front yard in Los Angeles. I will use it to demonstrate some of Paper Camera's filters.

The filter from Paper Camera used in this picture of the gazania is called Comic Boom.

The affect on the gazania here is a Paper Camera filter called Con Tours.

This is the screen of Paper Camera and you can see very simple instructions, hand drawn. It appears upside down on the iPad which usually rights itself. However it does not with this application, although the tiny arrows at the top allow you to turn you photo in any direction. The tiny box with lines at the bottom allows you to find any photo in your photo file on the iPad and then you simply click a large arrow at the top right to choose your filter.

The filter for this gazania variation is the Gotham Noir application and aptly named.

Granny's Paper filter changes the gazania to a rich dark monochromatic almost fabric like appearance.

Another change to the gazania. This appearance by Paper Camera is titled Neon Cola.

This Paper Camera filter is called Pastel Perfect. This is the last one I will put on the blog but there are a few more with titles. They do not tell you the result but are fun just seeing how each of these filters will affect your photo. Also on this application you will find, Bleaching, Half Ton (no e), Acquarello, and Old Printer. I have yet to put one of my drawings or paintings into Paper Camera to see how I might change it and possibly discover a new way to work, but I will.