Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Odds and Ends

I haven't been working on any large pieces for the past few weeks, so I thought instead I would share some odds and ends with you.

This weekend I drew out designs for two altar squares. Our church makes an altar cloth every year for First Communion. All of the kids who are receiving communion for the first time submit an altar square. A kind volunteer from the church then sews all of these squares together to make the altar cloth. Next year at the same time, the cloth will be dismantled and the squares will be returned to the kids as a keepsake to remember this special time in their lives.

So I drew up squares for two kids and transferred them to the fabric. I let the kids tell me what they wanted on their square (believe it or not they had very specific ideas!). Then I took their idea, drew it out and showed it to them for their approval. Once I transferred the images to the cloth, I traced over the pencil lines with a thin bead of Crayola Squeezables. The kids will then use fabric paint or markers to finish coloring in the design. The Squeezables should make it easy for them to stay in the lines. Here are the two images. The blank area at the top of both designs is where I erased out their names to protect their privacy.



The other image I have to share with you is some pen work from my class last week. (This week we started working on a drawing which I hope to post here later.) Last week we worked on drawing trees. You can see at the top and on the left where I was playing with some bark textures. At the bottom is a tree I started. I wanted to use straight lines to indicate the leaves because it seemed more challenging. Unfortunately, instead of following my reference which had very few leaves, I went for a fuller tree and it turned out a little "cotton ball-y". While it was fun to get caught up in experimenting, the results would have been more realistic if I had followed my reference. Of course I feel like I learned more by experimenting. So here is my cotton ball tree for all of you to enjoy!

3 comments:

Robyn Sinclair said...

Nice texture technique, Stacy. I love pen and ink - I get very distracted by all the beautiful mediums one can choose.

Stacy said...

Robyn, you snuck in here and read the late night version of my post. I fixed it up this morning because I write better when I'm not half asleep. :D

I get distracted with medium choice too. There are so many that are fun to work with! I've been drooling over the recent WC pastel class and telling myself to resist temptation!

Anonymous said...

Stacy,

I love pen and ink, tried to do a bit of it myself but don't really have the time to take it seriously. Looks like you're really getting to grips with it, though!