Louise Smith

Here’s a view of downtown Vancouver from the North Shore.  The sky is painted (poured on a shade of blue and let physics do its thing), the moon’s a swirl of gutta, and everything else is hand-stitched.  The twinkles are stitches in metallic thread.

I love metallic thread.  It’s just glitter for grown-ups.

The camera doesn’t see things exactly as your eyes do…it was hard to choose a photo that shows this piece accurately, when it changes so much depending on the lighting.  I decided to go with this shot with the water catching the light.  In low light the water looks darker than the sky.

Gosh that was a lot of little stitches.  Once you go to a certain level of detail on one building, you’ve got to do them all!  Go tiny or go home.  I hear my sewing machine calling me for the next picture or two…

Here’s a duck in Beaver Lake in Vancouver’s Stanley Park.  There are beavers there too now, but we didn’t see them yet – just their teethmarks.

I used my water wibble technique to paint the far background.  Water wibble what now?  It means I get plenty of wet paint on the brush and let it doodle around on the silk how it wants.  The less effort you put in, the more it’ll look like water, in my experience.

The reflections of the grasses are done using silk paint that’s almost dry and with heart firmly in mouth.  Make a mess here, and all of a sudden you have more sewing to do!  The duck and grasses are hand-stitched, and there’s a little clump of free motion machine embroidery making up the grasses at the bottom right.

I’d sure love to see those beavers.  In the meantime here’s a Vancouver Sun article and video of them, possibly featuring my paddling friend above.

Heh, I know it’s a grand name for a little picture of a weed.  I described in the previous post how this one was made.  For the fine fibres that surround the seeds, I pulled silk threads from the frayed edge of the work, roughed them up so they separated into thinner threads, then used little stitches to secure them to the background.

Just an update on a new dandelion clock picture I’m working on.  I decided to play with a leafy-look background.  Below right is the patterned “underwear” which I put beneath the translucent green-painted silk, trying for a foliage effect.  I tore up two different shades of acid-free white paper and stuck them to a blue background.  The blue makes the green of the silk a shade cooler (helping make the background look more distant).

I anticipate the dandelion will stand out more from the background when finished.  Everything’s in a half-done state right now, but that’s a ribbon for the stem, and a mix of hand-stitching and gluing of knotted frayed threads for the fluffy stuff .

A very small piece of paradise at 3 x 4 inches.  You could almost be there…if you hold it right up to your face : )

There’s a little bit of everything here, in terms of techniques.  The sky and sand are painted, but the mountains are a torn-off piece of dark blue acid-free paper that shows through the silk from behind.

The clumps of trees are mostly free motion machine embroidered, but the ironwoods on the right are thread lint stuck on with glue (ah, that ancient art of sticking on), and the palm is hand-stitched.  The hut’s a piece of cotton, hand-painted.   There’s also some detail worked using fabric pens, paint and pastels in the background.

The beach plants in the foreground (I think tree heliotrope) are what made me choose to create this scene, as I could imagine machine embroidery making these “grow” quickly on a painted background of sand.

Now for just a little rest and relaxation of my own, before going on to my next picture!

I took a photo of this dandelion-in-a-state-of-undress in someone’s yard in downtown Vancouver. The background was painted by pouring both green and white (also called medium) silk paint onto the silk at exactly the same time. Interesting swirlies resulted, so I was happy with that.

The stem is a green ribbon that I shaded with paint. It has a nice sheen that unfortunately doesn’t show up in the photo.

The seedhead is made up of lots of little stitches. The seeds are knotted thread. I gave each piece of thread a bad hair day, using a needle to separate the strands from each other, then glued them to the background with acid-free glue. I also stole some warp threads of silk from the rough edge of the piece and did the same with them. Those have a nice sheen too.

Finally, I used a little bit of white pastel dye stick to help highlight the seedhead, and a few dots of fabric pen to help shade the thread that makes up the leaves.

Fiddly but fun!

BC locals might recognize this as the view of DeBoville Slough in Coquitlam  from Cedar Drive.

It’s quite nerve-wracking to paint reflections!  But you have to embrace it at some point if you want to depict British Columbia landscapes.

I painted the sky and the water first.  Then I did some of the machine sewing.  Then, alarmed at the oomph of the embroidery compared to the water, I went back and painted the water a stronger colour.

The furthest-away of the foreground grasses are hand-sewn, some in 1-ply thread.  Then I machine-sewed grassy strokes and loops across those in thicker thread, to make the closer grasses look closer.

This scene reminds me of the happy weekend I once spent doing the Minnekhada Art in the Park Festival, as you pass it on the way.

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Wow!  And this is just the poster.  Great work by Kali putting it together.  I’ll have a few miniatures in this show and will be there doing some sewing.  It’ll be so nice to see my Art Focus friends again!

This miniature is based on a view from a beach in Hawaii, but I guess it could be anywhere you like to imagine.   The sky, distant island (Kahoolawe), and blue-coloured water are hand-painted, and so is the sand at the bottom.

There’s machine stitching to create the look of the white water, and some lint from chopped-up wool glued to the very edge of the water.  It helps bulk up the wave and hopefully make it look like it’s just about to break over your toes.  Then a hand-stitched boat and some tiny stitches in shiny invisible thread to make glints on the water, which don’t show in this photo.

And I can’t mention Hawaii without recommending slack key guitarist Makana.  His music’s featured on the film The Descendants which I (wrongly) haven’t seen yet, or look for him on YouTube.

My husband and I became Canadian this week!  What a relief to get through all the paperwork and tests, and I’m so excited to be able to vote.  Also wondering when the jury service requests will start rolling in, as I seem to be highly magnetized that way.  Coming soon to a courthouse near you!