Louise Smith

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!

At only 3 x 4 inches this was fairly quick to do.  (It didn’t really take a month, I’ve been on vacation : )

I squeezed out a line of gutta along the water edge.  When the gutta was dry I painted the sand below in quick strokes with a brush.  The gutta stops the sand colour bleeding into the part I want to be blue.

When using gutta there is always a slightly heavier deposit of colour right next to it.  The paint stops dead at the gutta and has nowhere else to go except back over on itself.  Luckily that’s exactly what I wanted in this picture, as there is naturally a slim shadow cast by the foam itself and the sand really does look darker there.

After painting the water I machine-sewed all crazy with white thread in the foreground to look like foam.   This is so forgiving, mistakes only make it better.  I also hand stitched some white wool in there at the thickest part for extra volume.

For the gull I used some white wool chopped up and glued down with tacky glue.  There are some stitches in there for his legs and wings, and I had to use tiny dots of pastel dye sticks (applied using the tip of a pin) to get the detail of the beak and eye.  For a long time little Kenny hovered between life and the dreaded fate of being unpicked and sewn over into foam, but he made it.  His shadow was the last thing I painted, and he was all “yay.”

Stuff grew on my dune!

I did some background sewing using the machine but most of the grasses were done by hand.  I also had to split threads a lot of times into a single ply, to be able to get those narrow points.

I’ve learned you can run an unthreaded machine needle over painted sand or rock areas to give them more texture. Also not a bad way to make distant footprints or tracks on sand or snow.  For even more impact, thread with a thickish thread, run over the areas you want, and then unpick.

This dune is in South Shields, north-east England, also excellent for curries, fish and chips, and ice cream.

Just the beginnings of a painted background.   This is about 5 x 7 inches.  There will be grasses, as long as I don’t mess anything up!  And I’ll be going stronger on the colours yet, because as soon as you put the first thread through, the background always recedes more than you expect.

This one is very wee at 3 x 3″.  It’s based on a photo I took in my Mam and Dad’s garden on my trip to the UK this year.  I was trying to take a picture of just the echinacea, but couldn’t get one without a bee doing a photobomb!  So I made a feature of it.  I like the way both the bee and the flower have a wing.

It’s hand-sewn except for the seedhead.  For that, I did a rough background on the machine and then those pesky pointy bits were done by hand.

The bee was great fun to do.  I stitched him by hand and then used the sharp end of my needle (oh this sounds horrible now) to rough him up a bit.  Did some trimming with scissors around the edges, so his belly is still fat but the edges of him appear further away.  There’s some invisible thread on the wing that catches the light.

As a side note, in the course of this picture I’ve learned that in parts of China, because the bee population has been pesticided down, whole villages have to pollinate their crops by hand using paintbrushes.  Art imitating life in a way I hope we don’t have to get used to.

A behind-the-scenes look.  This is my 7″ diameter hoop.

And I promised myself I wouldn’t make any bee puns, so I’ll quit before I give in to temptation.