Four out of thirteen figures are now done. Pretty happy with the results so far. I’ve used a mix of matte and shiny fabrics like satin and silk, and you can get different shades out of the same fabric depending on the angle. Very annoyed though that Lincraft now will not sell cuts of fabric less than 1 metre… damn you Lincraft!
This December will be 20 years since we moved to Melbourne, and I think it’s a fine place to live in, despite the random weather, railway crossings, high cost of living, Punt Road and way too much black in fashions.
It’s been almost five months, but I’ve finally finished the templates for the figures.
It took me a couple of false starts to figure out how to approach this. At first I simply tried tracing the figures in Illustrator, but the original image was too pixellated, so everything blurred together when I zoomed in and I ended up with a bunch of ugly blobs. Then I decided to print out the enlarged figures on A3 sheets, trace over them with a pen, scan the drawings and trace over the pen lines in Illustrator. That resulted in more detailed figures, but they still looked too blobby. So the final solution was to redraw the figures from scratch, so that the planes of colour would look crisp, clean and angular. Sometimes there’s just no taking shortcuts unfortunately.
I am happy with the outcome though, let’s see how long it takes me to actually execute this in fabric! I might have to simplify this if the detailing is too small and fiddly.
Every autumn or so, we go picking wild mushrooms in various spots around Melbourne with my Dad and recently my sister. This seems to be a European thing to do, and gets a pretty bemused reaction from most of the Australians I know:
A. Mushrooms? Are they magic mushrooms, hahaha?
B. But how do you know which ones are good to pick?
After making my way through about 50 shades of grey fabric, the background is finally done! Mum’s dining table can now remain nice and clean while I work on the character figures.
yggdrasille.com 