Louise Smith

This picture is 2.25 x 3.25 inches, but the painted and stitched areas are smaller than that. The eagle-eyed among you will spot my almost invisible signature in the bottom left-hand corner.

Usually I do all sorts of colour tests and stitch-securing immediately off to the side of the piece, which I conceal behind the mat when framing. But I wanted to challenge myself to do a more “tidy” piece. The background trees, mountains and sky are painted, and the rest is hand-stitched. The boat hull is a piece of hand-painted ribbon.

I chose the name Vignette because of the way the picture fades in at the edges. But it seems that vignette is also the word for a boat licence in Europe. So, I’m making puns even without trying.

I know, I keep being naughty and doing more and more waterscapes!

This one is 3.5 x 3.125 inches and depicts a heron in a river in White Rock, BC, having a reflective moment or probably just looking for some fish.  My husband did suggest the title Keep Your Heron but I said no.

Lately I’ve been representing water with stitching, but for this scene I wanted to paint the water and make the heron and the surface water bubbles stand out by embroidering them.

I used my wibble technique to paint the water.  Even though you’ll see a lot of vertical lines in the water (reflections of some trees we can’t see), they’ve been painted horizontally, with a zig-zag motion of the brush from side to side.  Wibbling is the technical term for this : )  Water demands a horizontal approach, or it will refuse to look like water.

The heron is stitched in regular sewing thread, in a mix of long and short stitches.  I tried to bulk out the body with an extra layer of stitches there.

A tricky aspect of stitching anything that stands alone like this, is that all the stitches have to begin and end behind the heron. Especially with the darker colors, if I anchored them off to the side of the piece, it would show through the silk.  The poor heron would look like it had faint lines springing out of it in all directions, like an airport flight path diagram or something.

And it was all looking a bit paint-by-numbers until I used an emery board to gently fuzz up the thread, which allows one color to blend into the next in a more realistic way.  I also used scissors to cut into threads sometimes to style as needed.

The bubbles are stitched in a shiny off-white thread.  For the larger bubbles I sometimes bulked them up with a stitch of regular white sewing thread underneath first.

More waterscapes are coming! It’s all the fault of White Rock.

Become a miniac!  Read an article about my miniature landscapes and explore the Daily Mini site for interviews with other artists who work in miniature, and pictures that inspire.

Thank you Maarten Meerman (read about his amazing nano-sized creations here) for kindly passing on my name!

 3.5 x 2.625 inches, hand embroidery on hand-painted charmeuse.

This is another view from aboard the ferry to Vancouver Island.  I did something I don’t usually do and painted a background behind the water. Perhaps it looks like sand, but in reality these were very smooth, glass-like areas of water.

I worked on some of this embroidery during Art Mart, a recent show in downtown Vancouver that was a joy to take part in.

There’ve been a lot of watery scenes lately.  I’m ready for some landscapes I think!

3 x 4 inches, hand embroidery and some ribbon work on hand-painted silk.

I poured on a wash of the sky color first, then painted the mysterious distant island (somewhere off the west coast of Canada) over the top of that.  The original source was a photo taken on a grim, cloudy day, but I manipulated the colors until it looked like a summer day with a heat haze.  I had some thread in hot blues I’d been itching to use.

The “far” lighthouse is made from semi-transparent pieces of ribbon, hand-painted and glued very carefully to the background.  This is like trying to glue down a bunch of snowflakes and not my idea of a fun way to spend an hour, I have to say.  Then the headland is hand-stitched in various shades of regular sewing thread and in a much better temper.

The “near” depth marker is made from normal-thickness ribbon, hand-painted and glued on.  There are a few stitches in there for details that were too fine to work in ribbon.  Then lots of hand-stitching in Sulky embroidery thread for the water.

I hope it makes you feel summery.

5 x 6.25 inches.  Hand embroidery on hand-painted silk. Somewhere between Vancouver Island and the mainland.

Try as I might, I can’t take a photograph that looks like the original. In reality the reflection is vertical and everything more purple and less brown.

However, you can judge for yourself if you want because Lightfall will shortly be exhibited as part of May is Art Month (see my post about Upcoming shows below).

I’ve been working on this and lots of other pieces, but nothing else finished yet. And taking reference photos of all kinds of boats, and getting them on the computer and looking at them close up, and seeing that some sailors of those faraway boats were waving at me!  I hope they weren’t waving for help.

Probably some more watery scenes coming up.

Yes a couple of shows coming up! (Click on the poster above to enlarge).

The other one is the first annual Art Mart, a one-day show on July 4, 2015 on the turntable at the Roundhouse in Vancouver (inside if it rains). I’ll be doing sewing and painting demos amongst a couple of dozen crafters and artists showing off their skills.

3.25 inches x 2.25 inches, hand embroidery on hand-painted silk.  For the water I use my super-shiny Sulky rayon.  The boat hull is a piece of painted ribbon.  For the rigging I stole a weft thread from the raw edge of my piece of silk.  One thread can then be split into hair-thin strands for all your rigging embroidery needs.  Best not attempted under the influence of eggnog!

The location of this scene is Gibsons, British Columbia (I believe I was facing northeast).  Depending on how the painting is lit, the water can look dark or light, so the photo shows a bit of both.

More boats on the way, in my usual well-spaced-out manner : )

I plan to exhibit Blue Plate Special in this fast-approaching show at Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, Burnaby, BC, October 24-26.  More details on my Events page.  Free admission and free parking!

This one’s 3 x 4 inches and made using several techniques.  The background is hand-painted on silk (I used gutta to keep the background silk white in the area of “white water”).

The trees in the middle distance are a mix of hand sewing and hand-glued thread lint (made by chopping up thread very finely).  Then the foreground tree branches and brush are created mostly using free motion machine embroidery, with occasional hand sewing for details like the bright pink flowers.

This composition is based on a view of a tributary of Pitt Lake, British Columbia, but the finished picture is destined for a new home in Italy.  Buon viaggio!