Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Pine in progress

I’ve been wanting to depict this pine tree on our street for a long time, so it’s nice to finally get going on it. The photo is a nice start but I’m going to leave out the distracting trees behind it and tweak the colors. 

Here is the sketch on tracing paper, not too detailed but gets the idea across:
I started with a plain piece of some generic white cotton fabric, then globbed a lot of acrylic paint onto a silicone-treated sheet, one of the ones made for ironing appliqué. I folded over the sheet a few times, added more paint, etc. then laid the white fabric on it and pressed down.
This is interesting, but is too dark and contrasty, so the next step (after letting it dry thoroughly) was to brush over some lighter, semi-opaque paint. I also added some metallic copper paint. This is more like it:
Here is a close-up of the painted background:
Acrylic gel was used to adhere the fabric to a stretched canvas, then it was allowed to dry. (Note: if I was going to go in a more quilty direction, I would skip that step.) Next I transferred the sketch by using my weird method of taping the sketch over the canvas and drawing underneath it onto the canvas with a watercolor pencil. Next, the outlines of the tree were painted on:
I plan to paint in some color then use a few if the collage papers shown in this post to complete the tree. But, we’ll see what actually happens!


7 comments:

Mama Pea said...

Cool. Thanks for sharing this process!

Quilt Rat said...

Off to a FANTASTIC start!

Dolores said...

What a unique technique. Wonderful.

Libby Fife said...

That is a good looking start. You say that you traced the design onto the canvas? I didn't quite get how you transferred the design.

I thought I would mention that I just recently tried the Transdoodle product for this exact type of thing. It worked wonderfully and I painted right over the tracing. I don't work for the makers of Transdoodle either:):):)

Diane J. Evans said...

How absolutely fabulous! What an eye you have for bringing your ideas to life!

Diane

Barbara Strobel Lardon said...

Love that tree, I can see why you wanted to use it. Your background choice is perfect. I will stay tuned for where you go next.

Unknown said...

Thanks for all the nice comments, y'all!

Libby, I don't literally transfer the drawing... the sketch on tracing paper is taped to the canvas, then I put my pencil underneath the tracing paper and sketch onto the canvas directly, using the sketch lines as a guide. Must take photo. : )