Project 2 Developing Your Marks - Stage 6

Using Thread and Yarns to Create Textures

I spent a lot of time going back and forward and changing my mind about which picture I wanted to base this final sample on.  Indecision is one of my weak points!  Eventually I decided to use a piece I made based on some photo's of an oil spill off of the Spanish coast last year.  I found them to be really affecting images, all at once finding them heart breaking and beautiful, and they stayed with me for a long time.  You can't see them brilliantly in the photo but one of the tings that I keep coming back to is the incredible contrast when you use complimentary colours together, blue and orange being a particular favourite of mine.

I made an image of the photograph at the top right using wax crayons and oil pastels to create the orange lines and then washing over the top with an exceedingly wet wash of dark blues and greys into which i dropped some salt and did some spattering of ink and water to create more texture.

 Then I made a wrapped sample of all of the thread colours I wanted to use to guide me in my colour choices as the literature had suggested.

When it came time to create the final sample I spent quite a lot of time obsessing about the colours of the fabrics not being exactly right, until it finally ocurred to me that it would be impossible to match everything exactly unless you had all of the thread and fabric in the world at your fingertips.

I ended up using a base of blue felt which was just far too blue so I stuck some patches of a pale blue shimmery sheer and some muddy green interweave stuff here and there, with some greeny-blue open weave hessian on top and a layer of navy blue netting topping off the sandwich.  When I began stitching I used some embroidery floss to do lots of tiny seed stitches here and there, followed by a detached chain stitch in a dark green and then I covered the lot in random patches of diagonal straight stitch in a pale blue cotton to try and represent the highlights of light on the waves.  The oil patches were created by first of oil couching down a big thick woolly/felty fibre thing, that I'm not sure what it is or where it came from but I love it, and then echoing the shape of that with rows of stitching in an embroidery floss and in various shades of orange cotton, I also couched down some thick orange tapestry wool.

Overall I am really pleased with the effect that I achieved here and once I got over the worry of the colours not being a perfect match I thoroughly enjoyed making this piece.