I now finished the mountains in the foreground, and it’s been a fun and smooth sailing so far. This artwork is one of my more structured pieces, a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with little room for experimentation. It’s a more rigid process perhaps, but I also find it quite soothing. As always, no matter how much leftover fabric I’ve got, I still need to make trips to the fabric stores for more shades!
I’m finally starting a new fabric artwork after nearly five years, probably my longest break yet thanks to the lack of inspiration and motivation. Another more positive reason is that ever since the pandemic I feel like less of a homebody on the weekend, and prefer to spend much more time outdoors even in winter months. Still, I look forward to a big new project I can really sink my teeth into.
It’s meant to be a companion piece for the abstract sailboat artwork I did for my Mum a while back, with a similar style and palette of vibrant colours. I’m basing it on this mountain landscape pic I found:
Now that I traced it, the final version is supposed to look something like this, although as always I expect I’ll have to simplify it during the process:
Life got in the way for a while, but I finally found the motivation and momentum to complete this project! The finer details, like the trimming on Woody’s cowboy hat, really brought it to life. Now I’ll have to see if my artwork meets the approval of the harshest critic, my three-year-old niece.
To infinity and beyond! Buzz is now finished, even if he looks a tad creepy at the moment with his blank eyes. After I finish the finer details that are too fiddly to do with fabrics, next is the assembly time, where I put the top and bottom halves of the artwork together on the background, and pray that they fit.
After I blitzed through the top half of the artwork, the more detailed bottom half with Buzz is coming along at a slower pace, mostly because of my changed work hours and good old-fashioned procrastination. Every time I look down at what I’ve managed to complete after five or six hours of work, I think to myself, is this all I’ve done today? However I am quite happy with the way it’s looking so far.
With plenty of free time and nowhere to go, I’m off to the flying start with this one, completing what usually would be a month’s worth of work in a week. I already had leftovers of about a hundred different shades of silk and satin, so I had to make very few trips outside for the supplies. For now, I’ve decided to leave the small details (like Rex the dinosaur’s teeth) for later, since they’re too fine for fabrics and I’ll probably have to do them with paper instead.
Because of the restrictions, I lost the luxury of using my Mum’s nice big dining table, but though the conditions in my apartment are more cramped, it’s been workable so far. I had to tell off my cat a few times for jumping on the working table and sniffing around, but most of the time he just wanted to curl up inside my fabrics box. Any new box is an instant cat magnet, and if that keeps him away from more destructive behaviour, fine, have a nappa.
I’m making this one for my little niece, who loves Toy Story (my sister is also a big Disney/Pixar fan, so everybody’s happy). I found an existing Toy Story art that’s absolutely perfect for my medium, but I tweaked the colour scheme; less artsy, more kid-friendly. I’ve already done away with some smaller details (sorry Bo Peep!), but I suspect I’ll have to simplify this a lot more along the way, or do the finer details with paper rather than fabric.
Now I hope I can round up all the materials before the next wave of coronavirus measures closes down everything. A time-consuming indoor hobby would be really handy now that I have six weeks off work in the next three months, and a strong possibility of the Australia lockdown happening.
I really wish I could have kept this one for myself, it’s one of my favourite pieces that I’ve done so far. The fire effects worked out pretty well – I ended up using layered transparent fabrics to simulate the flames, and shiny red and gold fabrics for accents. They definitely added a lot to the artwork.
The moment of truth this past weekend, as I finally combined the main figure with the background! This deceptively simple task took me about five hours; I had to cut out the shape along the edge very carefully with the scalpel, then paint the edges to mask the white cardboard. Next up is finishing a few small details of the armour that would have been too fine to cut out, and doing the fire effects… somehow.
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