Spellbound
2.75 x 4 inches. Hand stitching on hand-painted silk. This scene of the northern lights is out of my imagination.
I started out by pouring some shades of blue and green onto the silk while it was stretched in the hoop. When you do this, the part of the silk that is bound inside the hoop doesn’t take up the colour properly. Usually it comes out a much paler version than the rest. In this case it came out a pale purplish colour that to me looks like an icy lake. So the picture practically painted itself. Above, you can see where I’ve re-hooped the silk so that the icy lake is in the foreground and I’ve started to hand-stitch some trees around it.
I used black thread to stitch a rough skeleton of the trees first. Then I went over the main branches with a grey-blue thread that looks like snow in shadow. Finally I used white thread for a topcoat of snow. I used full-thickness thread for the nearest trees and half-thickness for the more distant ones.
More northern lights pictures are coming.