Venice Series

Monday, December 29, 2014

A few years ago, actually many years ago, I visited Venice.  I am in love with its beauty and architecture, and I have always been drawn to artworks showcasing this fascinating city.  Since I was a teenager when I went there, what few pictures I have, I took with a Kodak Instamatic camera using color slide film.  I am dating myself here as color slides were apparently the cool thing at the time.   I don't even have a projector to look at these pictures!  Needless to say, I don't have a wealth of Venice photos to use for my artwork, and it became necessary to find images from other sources that are free to use.

I discovered a website, Morguefile.com, where you can download many royalty free images for free.  However, I always encourage checking the terms of use for individual photos if you choose to use them.  After downloading some photos I liked from that website, I cropped them first, and then enhanced the colors and added filter effects in Photoshop Elements.  I printed these images to fabric and free motion stitched them to create the series you see below.

I have a little money saving tip for you about printing images to fabric.  Each of these pictures are 8" x 10".  I could have printed each one separately on a 8.5" x 11" fabric sheet on my home printer.  As you may know, these sheets can be a little expensive, and then you have to add in the cost of your ink cartridges.  Sometimes I have had trouble with my printer jamming or I run out of ink in the middle of a printout, and then I have wasted a fabric sheet.  One way to avoid this is to combine the images into one large jpg file and upload it to Spoonflower or another custom fabric website.  By filling an entire yard of fabric with multiple images, I am able to get all of them printed at once with less trouble, and for only the price of one yard.  Just to show you a simple comparison, you could actually fit 16 8" x 10" images on one yard of fabric for about $20, whereas 16 printouts on separate fabric sheets (many of which are at least $2 a sheet) would run you about $32.