Let's Talk About Design Details...
Let me guess… you haven’t finished your blooms yet??
Thats fine! We’re adults in charge of our own lives, and this is supposed to be fun. Take all the time you need.
We’re going to take some time away from stitching to talk about giving our designs dimension.
There are obviously more styles than the graphic and painterly styles I shared in the “first blooms” session, but we’re going to take those styles, graphic and painterly, and apply the same concepts to how our leaves show up.
GRAPHIC STYLE
With a graphic style, you may want to focus more on the shapes of the leaves and allow them to be more flat in color. The below example is very flat in color, though I did play with differences in texture.
(this is, from the top: three rows of chain stitch, rows of running stitch extremely close together, and seed stitch)
Below, another bloom in a graphic style using fly stitches in solid colors. The focus on the foliage of this design was shapes and textures.
Next session we’ll go into the foliage stitch used here in more detail.
Graphic layouts needn’t be unrealistic though.
In the below design, large thick borage leaves are left open at the spine, allowing the background fabric to be the “shading” in the leaves.
PAINTERLY STYLE
I made a rather exciting discovery when I was working on my amaranth embroidery, the one I shared last week - after I finished the first stem (seen at the far left, below) the design felt… flat.
Each leaf was perfectly blended from dark green at the middle to light green at the stem. While beautiful, I knew that, if repeated over and over, it might not result in the desired finished work I wanted - I wanted dimension, I wanted the piece to feel like an abundant field filled with blooms, not simply a row of plants.
So I began changing up each and every leaf. Some were mostly light colors, some were mostly dark colors. The lighter colors began to feel as though they were popping off the fabric, while the darker colors faded gently into the background.
The piece started to come to life.
Note the leaves below - some are all light, some are all dark, and the rest are various blends in between.
I also started to add some copper and fuschia accents, in a single strand or two so the high contrast colors would blend more gently into the overall finished piece.
It’s experiences like this that remind me… the best way to inform the creative process is within the act of creation.
A line that stands out to me from I book I haven’t read in years (though happened to divinely open up to this exact page) says:
“the function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars” One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential…
…the point is that you learn how to make your work by making your work…” (from Art and Fear)
And this is the chief purpose of the creative practice.