Jenny's Australian Needleart Journey: Can't See The Forrest For The Trees

And for another take on this theme
Jenny's Australian Needleart Journey: Can't See The Forrest For The Trees

Forest

I also finished this piece today. (Isn't end of the month great?) I called it, somewhat unimaginatively, Bush Road, and it's the first of several postcard-sized pieces I want to make using the image of the old coach road at Mt York that I shared earlier.

I scanned the photo and played around with it in Corel PhotoPaint. I actually printed out three images based on this scene, so I haven't finished with it yet! This size allows me to try different approaches without investing too much time and thread (though it always takes me way longer to thread paint than I expect!).

It's stitched with free motion straight and zigzag stitching, with the colours built up from dark to light. Sometimes I use two different top threads to blend colours, but this piece is so small, I mostly used single threads and overlaid the various stitching to blend. I use the print colours as a value indication but often I use very different hues to the original images. The trick is not to lay down too much thread in an area you plan to blend, or the needle won't pierce the thickness.

I am so happy with how this one worked out! It really feels like the Australian bush to me.

Where You Live

I finished this challenge piece today, though it turned out to be more of a technical challenge than I expected! It's called It Takes a Village, a reference to the allegedly African proverb, "It takes a village to raise a child," on which Hillary Clinton has based the title of her book. This village in the middle of the city has helped me raise my two kids and provided a safe and loving environment for them to grow up in. (That's not the case for so many of the world's children.)

The background is a painted representation of this village-in-the-city, with a stitched overlay of the front of my house. I painted the surrounding bush with dimensional additive in the paint, but the additive may have been a little elderly. It certainly didn't behave the way it did last time. The result this time was rather spotty, like a bad case of acne! I also didn't have any soluble paper to use as the basis for the house image, so I printed onto ordinary paper, something I've done before many times. It worked fine to transfer the stitch, but that dimensional paint just grabbed hold of it and wouldn't let go! I thought I might have to toss the whole thing, but persistence with the tweezers and unpicking and redoing some of the stitching in the worst affected areas did the trick. It's not quite what I imagined but it's finished and I don't actually hate it.

Heartland Postcard

I've worked hard in the workroom these past few days but I can't share what I've done. Both pieces are for challenges, due tomorrow, so I'll show them to you then. But I thought I'd show you a postcard I made earlier, that included a mud map. It's from one of my favourite places in the world - the Barrier Ranges, near Broken Hill, where I grew up. The mud map shows the western escarpment, where the ranges drop down to the Mundi Mundi plain. When you stand on the edge of the escarpment, you feel utterly alone. The wind always blows, so conversation is difficult. This is an ancient land, and you are standing on its bare bones, worn down by years. The huge plain stretches out in front of you, the horizon drawn with a child's ruler. It's criss-crossed with dry creeks carved out by the force of the water coming off the ranges from the occasional violent downpours in this dry land. Look up and the mighty bowl of the sky, brazen blue, is a million miles above your head. Some wedgetail eagles circle lazily, riding the currents. On the far horizon, blue on blue, is a single pinnacle, and when you look at a map, you realise it's nearly 100 miles away. Between it and you, there are maybe twenty people.

Paint Rags - Flowerpot

Remember this from a couple of days ago? When I was painting yesterday, I had just the right colours on my mixing sticks to add some more flowers to this piece. One of the colours I had mixed was just right to add shape to the flowerpot. It's really starting to come together now, isn't it? Pretty exciting for something that started life as a paint rag!

Where You Live

I also painted my mud map in today's painting session. The shape of the mud map was based on aerial photos from sites like FlashEarth and street directories, as I wanted to give an impression of my little suburb-within-a suburb, surrounded by the bush. I painted the ovals and some elements with flat paint, but I painted the bush and some of the urban areas with Setacolor expandable paint mixed into the paint. I plan to puff the paint once I have finished stitching, so hopefully it will look as three-dimensional and lush as it does in aerial photographs. I think I may need to paint it a little more yet, to create a denser cover in my village. I also haven't decided yet whether to stitch or paint the silver line of the motorway.

Valley Mist

I finally found a chunk of time to paint this afternoon. Painting is always a challenge for me because it needs significant uninterrupted time that coincides with my energy levels. The stars were finally in alignment today!

First task was painting the next stage of this misty valleys piece, which has been sitting, masked for painting, for over a week. It's still a bit hard to show where it's going, but I am very excited about progress so far.

You'll remember I painted masking medium over the light bits that I wanted to stay light? I also drew in some guidelines with white chalk pencil, because sometimes when you're painting, it's hard to work out where you meant to paint! I found the chalk pencil seemed to be acting as a resist too, so that might be interesting when it all comes out. Perhaps I'll have unexpected white lines!

Basically, this time I painted between the lines, varying the amount of paint and water so that the coverage is uneven. I had the nasty experience of getting a piece too wet and causing the Setacolor resist to get sloppy, so I am careful not to let things get too wet now.