ABYDDOS MAN (WAP#14; Egypt)

Isn't he beautiful?
With the large cat claw on his arm, I'm guessing that he might be a young priest.  We found him in the Temple of Abyddos, which is the cult centre of Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of death & resurrection.

Ideally, I'd have liked to recreate his whole profile in fabric, but realisticly.... there's no way I could manage that using contemporary reverse applique within an A4 space!!

What to do?

The obvious of course, get out pencil & paper & make visual notes of what I see.

Whilst I was reproducing those patterns with pencil, I wondered whether the way to capture the essence of the patterning on this man, was to create, what I call, a composite piece.  In short I make up each pattern into a seperate block & then sew them together a bit like patchwork.
It's a method I have used before with my Adelaide Architecture based work & I find the outcome pleasing, so...why not try it with these patterns?
I spent some time trying to work out a layout for the various patterns, having first identified thirds & quarter measures.  Whatever I did needed to look balanced.

My colour palette was to consist of various neutrals in 3 tonal values; dark, medium & light.
Whilst I have a lot of fabrics in this range, it was time consuming to find happy trios of tonal values, without including my expensive fabrics.  The mantra "this is just an exercise" had to have the volume turned up a few times!!

Finally I had 3 different fabrics for each 'patch', some fabrics being used in more than one  to ensure a sense of cohesiveness.  I also chose 2 variegated cottens to sew the outlines in with.  One was a grey to brown & the other a chocolate brown to gold.  Because they were going to be quite obvious, I had to be particularly careful with my stitching!!  Consequently it took more time than I'd expected!!

Here are how my patches looked after being cut back;

By the time I came to do the spiral piece, I knew I needed a heavier contrast to add some energy to the overall impact.  This curtain sample was perfect.  

Before sewing them all together, I laid them out in the order they were to go, did a bit of rearranging, tried another variation, and went back to my original layout albeit with a slight adjustment!  I recognised that I needed a bit more of that purple to tie it all together & was relieved to find there were sufficient scraps left!!  Then it was time to stitch & iron the seams back!

Here is my final result and I'm very pleased with it.  It could easily be finished to exhibition quality if I wanted to.  This is the first time I've used this composite method of design for one of my WAPs & whilst it totally engaged me creatively, it did take longer than a day to complete. All up I think I've invested about 8 hours on this little piece.  It was worth it though.  Each week these projects help me practise my skills in design , the technique itself & self critique when it's done.  Hopefully, all this practise culminates in making me a better artist as well, week by week!

HATHOR HEAD (WAP #13 inspired by Egypt)

Our visit to Dendera had been amazing...even if the interior had been too dark for me to get any good photos .  We'd walked around admiring the carving on the exterior of the building & had expelled our last sigh of "Wow!".  As we headed towards the exit there was one last surprise, this beautiful Hathor Head.  Once upon a time it would have stood atop a column, but now it graced the ground, so that we could get a close up look at her.

At some stage in her history someone had smashed her nose off, but to me, this did not detract from her beauty.  Throughout our month in Egypt & the MANY Hathor likenesses I took photos of, this would prove to be my favourite.

I'm embarrassed to confess that, so struck have I been by the face,  it has only been relatively recently that I noticed that there are more Hathor faces on this column, the two others in this photo are in profile!

It was a no-brainer to have Hathor's beautiful head as my last muse from our Dendera visit, so out came the pencil & paper.

After my initial sketch of what I saw in the photo, I decided that I wanted to make my piece symetrical, so the easiest way to do that was to draw up half a design to my satisfaction & then trace it onto the other side.  Before doing that though, I'd need to work out what I wanted to include in my design. In the 'hair' I'd noticed that some of the carvers chisel marks were still visible, so I decided I'd like to use them to add some textural interest.  As I was working, I wrote down colour possibilities & asked myself questions like; would I keep it flat & 2-dimensional or would I giver her some sculpted shadows & form?

I finally liked the look of my half-Hathor, so pulled out an A4 sheet & folded it in half ready to transfer my design onto one half & copy onto the other.
Arghhh!  It didn't take long to realize that this was going to be a problem!! It was not physically possible to get all the details that I wanted  into half an A4 & produce that design in contemporary reverse applique!!  What was I going to do???

Looking at my preliminary drawing, I noticed that the half I'd designed formed a portrait orientation...perhaps I'd stick to half a Hathor on my A4?

I was so engrossed in working this design up, that I let my coffee go cold!

With design drawn to scale, cutting back process planned & fabrics chosen, I stitched in the initial stitches for the first outline.  Before cutting back I drew onto the fabric where I want my cutting line to be.  This helps me focus & not get over enthusiastic with my cutting!!

Here's how the cutting back went...

The final result & I'm reasonably happy with it.
I'm very pleased with the choice of fabrics particularly the multi shade gold & blue that form the hair.  I'm also glad I listened to my instincts & didn't cut her lips back to gold. Keeping them blue works well & gives a sense of balance.
Unfortunately I had a glitch with one of my fabrics, which means there isnt as much variation in the profile face as I would have liked, & overall, that didn't work well!  I'm pleased with the main face though & if I were working this up as a 'real' piece of art, then I'd add some beading.

I couldn't help it....I had to give Hathor the app treatment!!!  Here is what I created using the Layout app on my phone.

I particularly love this one!!!

What fun this art project has been.  Next week I'll be revisiting a different location in Egypt & look forward to seeing what inspires my creativity there.

LOTUS LADY (WAP #12; Egypt)

The Temple of Dendara not only has fabulous painted relief work & pillars on the interior, but it also has some spectacular carved imagery on the exterior as well, including this beautiful lady oozing with lotuses!
To be honest, I'd love to do a  really big reproduction of her, but for today's purposes, I needed to set my sights a lot smaller!

I was intrigued by the number of lotus variations that she was carrying, so decided to take visual notes of them...as is my usual practice.  In the process of looking I noticed, for the first time, that hanging from her hands are some perfume amphorae.  Their shape is so elegant & in keeping with the lotus, that I wondered if there was a way I could incorporate them into my design.
The other part of this figure that I loved, was the hair! Could I use the brick pattern of the hair as some sort of border perhaps???

With a considerable amount of drawing, erasing & tweeking, I finally arrived at a design I was happy with.  This meant that I could dive into the fabric stash & see what I came up with!!

Given the very linear nature of this figure & her offerings, I decided that I would try a different variation of the contemporary reverse applique technique for this week's art project, and only needed two layers of fabric.  One of them was very colourful & flecked with gold lines across it.  Picking up on that gold, I chose a fabric with a gold tinge to it for my topmost layer..

My concentration needed to be on full volume as I worked out the stitching lines for this experiment. (An infusion of caffeine helped!!)

The stitching took a while but went without a hitch.
I took a lunch break then, because I knew I was going to have to fully concentrate on my cutting back as well. Having a break prevents brain fry!!

This is the final result & I am very happy with it...I also had fun producing it, which is always a bonus!!
This variation is effective with a multi coloured background fabric, although it would also be quite dramatic with a plain fabric as well.
I enjoyed doing it so much I'm rather keen to try it in a bigger format...I'll have to get my creative brain working on a possible design!
Revisiting my travel memories in this way is proving to be an enjoyable & worthwhile project.  I can't wait to see what next week will hold for me!

BA-KA (WAP #11; Egypt)

 Still with Luxor as our base, it was time to get out into the countryside & have a day trip to see the most intact of the ancient temples; Dendara.  This was the cult centre for the goddess of motherhood, love, music, dance & joy...the cow headed Hathor.

As a dairy farmer's daughter it was predictable that I'd be attracted to the ancient god with the cute cow ears, so you can imagine how excited I was to see beautiful Dendara, with it's huge columns and blue & white colour still visible in places.

 Having visited a few ancient sites already, we were beginning to become familiar with some of the characters & motifs appearing on the walls & columns.  Naturally we both started to have favourites, ones that we  immediately  recognised & were drawn to.  The Ba & Ka figures were one of my favourites....or two of my favourites!!

These two human-headed birds represented two aspects of the inner self.  The Ba was the Spirit, that left the body of the deceased & could fly on to the Spirit world.  Whereas the Ka was the Soul & destined to be earthbound.  It remained with the mummified body & took it's nourishment from offerenings left by relatives.

Although I am consistantly getting the two of them mixed up, I have always liked the imagery of the Ba & Ka as a visual representation of our spirit and/or soul so it was these that I chose as my inspiration for this week's art project.

 
When my children were younger we lived in the UK & whilst there my son collected the Horrible History series.  One of the magazines came with a set of Hieroglyph stamps & ...ahem....several years ago they made their way into my art supplies! 
This was the perfect time to use them to make a background!
I used the stamps to form the glyphs for Hathor, joy, music , love & motherhood.  It took rather a long time & it was very hot in my workroom at that time, so I abandoned the project until today, when temperatures have finally dropped to a more comfortable working climate!

 Before even starting to think of how I was going to compose elements into a design, I needed to draw the Ka to get an idea of proportion & placement.  I also experimented with how I wanted the wings to look. 
All through this period of visual note taking, I was also considering HOW I was going to achieve this using the contemporary reverse applique technique.

 Once a design was settled upon it was time to think about fabrics.
As I mentioned last week, I have a lot of scraps!  Although it had been challenging to only use scraps to 'colou' last week's project, I wanted to try it again this week too, so out came the blue bin. 

With Dendara having a blue & white colour scheme, it was natural that I choose these colours for my Ka.

 The most difficult fabric choice was for the background.  I'd not stamped enough hieroglyphs to have them across the whole background, so I needed something else that would allow the Ka to shine, but would still be interesting.
I chose a natural coloured hessian because of the texture of the weave.
Here's how the cutting back progressed...

 In my initial plan, this was the final outcome.
However, much as I loved the hessian background, it proved to be just a little TOO plain for my liking!
What to do????

 I opted to add another texture to it!
Instead of repeating the hieroglyphs, this time I made my own stamp from foam & added some long triangles to represent the rays of the sun god Amun.

Obviouly, it would look much better if I had added the triangles BEFORE stitching in the Ka then I could have achieved a more thorough coverage & consistent pattern.!  I'd chosen stamping because I thought it would be quicker, but I could just as easily have chosen to embroider triangles.
However, I am pleased with how this has worked out, & I'm particularly pleased with my little Soul-bird!
When my husband saw this, he complimented me on the hessian as a background as it reminded him of mummy wrappings.  He's right....and I can't believe I didn't think of that myself!!!  Maybe I did at a subconscious level!!!!
Regardless, this has been an engaging art exercise to start the month of March with. Cheers until next week!