Working in a Series

Monday, October 27, 2014

In January of 2013, I started a six month 'Working in a Series Class' taught by Heather Thomas.  I had been wanting to create a series of bird pictures, and this was an excellent incentive to get them done as well as learn something along the way.

I used this series as another opportunity to design my art in Photoshop Elements.  I wanted to create the look of transparent layers with my fabrics much the way you can set transparency levels on your digital layers.

Each of the pieces were to be 16" x 20", so I created the background layer with a batik fat quarter.  The second layer was achieved by fusing chiffon over the batik.  Depending on the color of the chiffon, I could achieve dramatically different color changes on the batik.  My 'third' layer was not really an actual layer, but a design that I stitched through the first two layers and a layer of batting.  After stitching the design, I painted it with acrylic paints, but I kept the colors watered down enough so that the batik layer would still show through. 

Finally, I appliqued the bird layer to the top.  In order to make the birds large enough and not have any seams, I created a jpg file of just the birds which I had printed as a fat quarter at Spoonflower.  The following is the first piece of this series.