Around my garden at the moment are triangular & sometimes diamond shaped patches of an almost fluorescent yellow. One of our succulents is flowering!!
Because this succulent is very easy to grow, I have, over the years, sunk branches of it into the ground all around my house. Therefore, it currently looks as if the garden areas are glowing with radiance.
One of the things I noticed, with one of the larger areas of this plant, was that the flowers seemed to line up in rows, forming a loose patchwork of flower & leaf. It was this occurrence that led me to 'play' with the idea further in this weeks art project.
As per usual, I began with pen & paper, mapping quickly what I could see & changing that first study into more solid shapes.
Once settled upon a design, I rummaged through the fabric stash until I had a reasonable selection that I hoped would produce an interesting composition.
My first task was to add some stitch to the background fabric. I had really liked the roughly painted terracotta coloured background in my preliminary work, but didn't have any fabric in the right tone. Therefore, I thought I'd add not only the colour, but texture through the randomly added lines of stitch to fabric.
After layering up my fabrics & then stitching the design through the whole lot, it was time to let the cutting back begin!
At this point it was time to think about how I was going to represent the flowers, because as you can see...I hadn't included any yellow fabric in my sandwich of layers!
I remembered that I had a flower stamp in my collection, so with a bit of paint & a scrap of fabric, I rustled up a stamp pad & started stamping!!
This was my final result...and I was going to leave it at that. However, when I went to type up my blog, life leapt out in front of me & interrupted my plans!! I was therefore, left contemplating this piece for another 12 hours.
I was thinking about how much I disliked it!
I recognised that, actually, that background colour just wasn't working for me & it may have been better...in hindsight NOT to add the sewn lines!
Most of all...those flowers did NOTHING for me at all, they were insipid & certainly did not express the vibrant energy of the initial source of inspiration!
So, when I got up this morning, I went into my workroom & did this;
Now, the first thing the eye is drawn to is the yellow flowers, and that is an improvement on the stamped version.
Because the eye is focused more strongly there, the background fabric does actually fade back, as it is supposed to.
All in all a fun little experiment & I'm glad I was delayed in writing this blog!
Timing is often... everything!!
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