Portraits on fabric

With the Summer holidays coming to an end, I thought that I should try to get back to working in the studio on a regular basis. This has been easier said than done as Selena has taken over where Melissa left off and she now spends quite a bit of her time there. So far this summer she has created many exciting things including a Duvet cover set. I bought her a plain white one and  she enlarged an image from A4 size paper to fit it. She pinned it to a wall in my studio and with great accuracy and ease drew it onto the Duvet cover and pillow.

 Selena's Duvet

 She is very creative and I can't wait to see how her work develops as she begins to prepare for her GCSE's.
Earlier this month I created a design from a photograph of Mel taken about a year ago, I played around with the image on photo shop and ended up with a posturized image (figure1) which I then translated onto fabric and  have shown below (figure 2 ).

(figure 1)

For this quilt I have used tie dyed fabric for the background (Mel dyed this) in combination with commercial fabrics to complete the rest of the design. This has been a technique which I have wanted to try for ages and as with any new process I have encountered a few challenges but I learn as I make mistakes. I intend to add quite a bit of free machine stitching next to add texture and some tonal interest and finally I will quilt the piece. In my next  post I will include more images showing the development of this.
I will also continue my development of the ideas mentioned in the last post and show how I get along with these as well.

 (figure 2)

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