I'm Pretty Sure I have ADD

The title pretty much says it all.  I'm pretty sure I have ADD.  Un-diagnosed ADD.  Self diagnosed ADD.  In any case I can't keep my mind on one thing to save my life.  Today I started this project...

I'm playing with the whole idea of making art quilts in the style of my paintings.  I want to do some actual painting on fabric but I'm broke!  I spent all of my fun money on supplies for my show quilt and now I need to get quilting to fund the rest of the quilt and Christmas.  (This is probably not the best business model, I know.  I'm in it for passion not profit people.  Though a profit would be nice!)

I don't know why the photos of my sketches came  out so - digitized!?!  They look really cool though don't they?

In any case this whole thing is actually for a blog hop I'm going to be in using batiks.  I was going to just make a dragonfly but then I had to get carried away and do more.  Because that's what I do.  LOL

The dragonfly wasn't enough so I added a sun and now I need to add a girl.  Me fifteen years ago?  Maybe.  A thinner, younger me.  Possibly a Hindu me because she does have a bindi.  :)

I sketched out the sun and the dragonfly in the same manner and assigned each section a number - I just forgot to take pictures of those.  I did make some changes as I went to make pieces that would be easier to turn the fabric under.  After assigning each piece a number I traced it onto freezer paper, then using the freezer paper as templates cut the pieces out of fabric.

I still need to turn under the tiny hair pieces today.  Everything but the girl is from batik fabric.  I'm thinking I'm going to play with shading her and her hair in a bit with my Shiva Paintstiks.  If I don't get side tracked that is.  :)

Playing with Paintstiks

Ok ok calm down.  I know some of you are going to go, "OH NO what did she do!"  Lol*  This is practice and it was practice for a reason - because I didn't want to fear experimenting.  I wanted to play with the paintstiks again and see if I could get a better result.  I'm pretty much sick of this so I probably won't do anything else...on to other things.  But I wanted to share some of what I've learned.

I used a finer brush this time with the burnt umber paintstik and I still think it was just too heavy handed.  This picture really makes it look much darker - it really isn't THAT dark.  But you can see the bottom feathers on the right I went much lighter...and it's so much more subtle.  Less like I just went and painted on my quilt.

I'm thinking the key to making the paintstiks work FOR the feathers instead of in place of the feathers is to number one, go light handed.  REALLY light handed.  Number two, stop trying to determine where shadow should be and just place shadow where it already is.  It looks SO much more natural, still makes the feathers pop without taking away from the actual quilting.

I think I will use the paintstiks again on a whole cloth project, but I'm going to reserve them for really accenting instead of actually painting.  In the end - I like quilts over paint.  :)  I want to maintain the look of a quilt!  ;)

Feathers and Paint

My paint sticks came!  This turned out pretty awful - so don't judge my talent (or lack thereof!) by this please!  LOL*  I didn't have any brushes or anything to clean my brushes out with yet so I found the one giant paintbrush I could dig out of my art supplies and a piece of paper to wipe it clean - ish.  I quilted up this little test piece on muslin with polyester batting and experimented with the paint to see what it would do.

 

How NEAT does that look with color BEHIND the feather?  Oh I must really get the correct supplies and play with this more...

Here's what I started with before painting...

Also a little curling feather free motion practice...