Touch of Light
5.75 x 6.25 inches, hand embroidery on hand-painted silk. A view from the ferry between the mainland and Vancouver Island. This one took a while…there was an apartment move since the last blog post, if that’s any excuse!
The photo below shows an earlier stage of the artwork. I’ve used some thread, which I later remove, to mark the edges of the picture and also to give me a straight horizon line. This picture goes almost to the edge of my hoop, so it was important for me to see clearly where exactly on-stage and offstage begin. Especially because I like to try out my colours in the wings.
I leave the thread in place while I paint the sky, because it physically stops my brush from blundering into the horizon line and messing up the white “touch of light” area.
I underpainted the whole water area, then stitched on top of it in lighter-coloured thread (Sulky machine embroidery thread, which I usually split into half-thickness or less depending on how distant the waves). The photo below shows where I probably stopped underpainting. Then I unpicked my edge thread and ironed the whole picture to seal the paint before starting to stitch. However, I did paint the sky some more after the sewing was completed. It often happens that the stitching ends up looking more intense than I expected and the background needs to be built up a bit more to match. Then I re-ironed just the sky area.
More water is on its way, in no great hurry of course!