At the end of last year I was kindly invited to join a group of fellow quilt artists known as 12 by the Dozen. It is co-ordinated by the lovely Hilary Gooding whom I have got to know over the past few years. I first met Hillary when I was assisting with the annual quilt challenge run by the Contemporary Quilt Group of the British Guild, and our distant friendship has grown from there.
Other members of 'The Twelve' are:
It is a real pleasure to be able to get to know all these people a little better and to share our ideas and our work. You can find out more about the group by clicking here. The current brief for the quilts we make is 'Works inspired by artists: 16" square'. It is a format I have really taken to as there is enough 'space' to work in, allowing for different ideas to take shape, but not so huge as to take a long time to create. Before I started the first quilt I decided to set myself a few additional guidelines. Wherever possible I want to try and create a portrait as my response to the artist selected; (so far so good on that front). I have decided to mount all my finished pieces onto stretcher bars and set into floater frames so that I might have a nice collection to hang in an exhibition in the future. So far I have made two quilts and am about to complete my third. For my first quilt (and the 8th in this series as I am a late comer to this round of quilts) was inspired by the Danish artist Vilhelm Lundstrøm - who was chosen by Mai-Britt Axelsen. He was an artist previously unknown to me, so another bonus. Below are a few images to give you a flavour of his work. For my quilt I chose the image on the bottom right of the collection above - called 'Seated Nude' and I focused just on her face. (Narrowing down which of his works to use was greatly helped by my earlier decision to try and focus on portraits.) Lundstrøm used clear, bright shapes and just a few bold colours to create his nude, so I decided to isolate the shapes and colours he used with the free shareware photo editing software known as Gimp. The results are quite interesting and could possible lead on to a small series focusing on colour in their own right. I looked through my box of hand dyed fabrics and found a selection that looked to be suitable.
Using Lundstrøm's original and the manipulated photos as a guide, I drew the face freehand and isolated the boldest shapes I could identify . I then enlarged it so I could use the shapes as a pattern for the fabrics. The photo below also shows the threads I chose to match the fabrics as I didn't want any additional thread lines to be particularly visible.
I traced the enlarged shapes onto bondaweb and then fused them to the back of the fabrics. The bondaweb stops the raw edges of the fabric from fraying when they are cut out, so I was able to collage all the pieces together directly onto the wadding to create the face. The image below shows how the collaged pieces were put together.
I then added simple free motion quilting to hold the pieces down, echoing the shapes. And here she is, my version of the face of 'Seated Nude', rendered in fabric - with a little added Markal oilstick paint to give the impression of the smudged areas on the original. Creating this simple quilt was an exercise in focusing on both colour and shape in this composition and it was very enjoyable to be able to make my first piece with the group. I have now mounted it onto stretcher bars and will make a floater frame to place it in. When I have a few of them finished I will share some more photos. For my next blog post I will share the next artist, Wilhelmina Barnes Graham, and my interpretation of one of her drawings, this time carefully examining how she used line in her compositions. Thanks for reading.
Wendy Weller
23/8/2018 09:14:15 am
Great use of hand dyed fabric. I hadn't realised that you had joined the 12 x 12 group, look forward to seeing the results of the challenges.
Claire
23/8/2018 02:31:03 pm
Hi Wendy Comments are closed.
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