On the Road
Monday, January 23rd, 2023
3 x 6 inches, hand embroidery on hand-painted silk. Memories from a late summer road trip from Vancouver to the Okanagan.
The blue sky was painted as a wash. I used a line of gutta to block the paint from running down into the bottom half of the composition. It promptly bled around the sides of course! But no harm done.
The very distant trees are hand painted using a toothpick to apply silk paint. I’ve used red thread to mark the edges of the picture temporarily.
Oh. And I underpainted the grasses but neglected to take photos of that stage. In the photo below you can see my paint blobs in yellow at the bottom, so imagine that underneath the yellow threads. At first I thought I could do without underpainting, but then the grass looked too pale and unearthly. So I unpicked my test threads, did the underpainting (and ironed it to seal the paint), then embroidered over the top.
For the foreground trees I used thread (thinned down sometimes to a strand or two) along with Tyvek fibres from my trusty FedEx envelope for the white tree bark.
The grasses are layer upon layer of blonde thread, which I’ve roughed up slightly with an emery board for a softer effect.