Photo Inspiration and 2020 Goals

I put together two fabric cards yesterday from photos that I took and thought you might like to see a bit of my process.

I love this photo because of the dramatic clouds and the sun bathed foreground. I wanted to do a layered look for the sky and I also wanted to use a somewhat complementary colour scheme of blues and yellow-orange. I rummaged through my fabric scraps and found a variety of blues and greys to use for the sky and I also found a great little piece of hand painted fabric that I had done that was the perfect colour for the foreground field and had round patterns on it that resembled round hay bales.

I began with the sky and cut curves in the blue and gray fabric to resemble clouds and movement and then layered them from bottom to top overlapping the edges. Next I took the yellow-orange field piece and put it down. Finding another yellow- orange fabric with a little textural detail in it, I cut it to resemble tree shapes and put it on last. Above is the card without any stitching.

To bring out details and a little more movement as well as to secure the pieces, I added stitch. I stitched the sky with white, gray and blue threads to give more dimension to the clouds. (The gold stitching in the sky was already part of the fabric I laid down there.) To make the trees appear darker, I over-stitched them with a sap green coloured thread and used the same colour to make rows in the field.

This photo was taken in Holland and it is a bit dark but I liked the windmill against the sky and the trees surrounding it. I wanted to make the foreground lighter and more interesting by using brighter colours and more texture.

I had a piece of fabric that had clouds and sky printed on it so I chose it for the background. Then I put the windmill building in place. Perhaps it could have been darker but I wanted the black details of the mechanisms to be visible. I stitched the blades with black thread as well as the wooden mechanisms. Then I found a variety of patterned green fabric and cut them to resemble trees and put them down overlapping their edges.

Further stitching was done to define the clouds in the sky and outline the trees.

Goals

Since the beginning of 2020, I have also been trying to figure out my goals for this year. I didn't want to have lofty goals that I could not complete but I did want to challenge myself a bit. Instead of writing them down on a list, I made a doodled manifesto that I could hang in my studio to catch my eye each time I was in there as a reminder.