Fauvism Challenge

Over on The Felting and Fiber Studio we have Quarterly Challenges. The First Quarter Challenge was from Ruth, it was a Fauvism Challenge. I was late getting mine done, and if you want to see some of the other brilliant entries, you can do here. I kept changing my mind about what I wanted to do, I thought I had finally made my mind up, but then looked at other entries and remembered a felt picture I made from a photo my sister took. You might remember it: http://feltbyzed.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/felt-picture.html

I took the original photo (without permission!) and altered the colours in Photoshop:

I'd had in my head that Fauvism was really bright, but the more I looked, the more I saw muted colours, unsaturated shades. There's one particular jade green that I started to see everywhere! I simplified the picture to get the colour bands:

And added some 'accented edges':

Then I blended the last one and first one together:

A lot of the Fauvist paintings had roughly blended brush strokes and patchy areas so I blended some colours for each band to try to get that effect:

I don't know which photo shows it better:

Then I added embellishment fibres for more effect, this is some Kapok on the pink, there's a bit of silk on the blue, trilobal nylon on the orange, and nylon staple on the blue:

 I don't know why I did that second band blue, I can see it's green on the photo, I clearly wrote 'green' on my template, and somehow chose blue! Maybe I tilted my laptop screen back too far (good excuse!) I did realise before felting and changed it:

The other embellishments and fibres I added are: some dark blue wool and light blue nylon for trees at the top; some green wool and red nylon for trees between the top orange row and blue one underneath it; green and yellow viscose staple on the green layer and some dark blue nylon for a hedge. The track lines are wool; I used viscose and nylon on the lower orangey band, and the blue/purple band at the bottom has dyed cotton nepps and nylon staple fibre added. This angle might show them a bit better:

I was quite disapointed when I looked at it, still wet, pegged on the washing line to dry, it looked so dull and flat:

It looked a lot better when it was dry, but I put lots of detail in the original one, so it still looks dull in comparison. If I ever get brave enough, I'll try some free motion stitching on it!

Felt Picture

I had an idea over the week to do a piece of felt for my sister to say thanks for helping me at MakeFest. (Sorry I never got around to posting about it here, I was just so exhausted all week, but you can read about it here). I saw a photo she took on The Way of The Roses cycle route, and thought that would make a great piece.

I made a simplified version on Photoshop as a guide:

I don't have a computer downstairs (or working printer) so I didn't have a photo to work from, but I did draw a guide :)

I marked out the bands on a template and did the first layer, I'm afraid some of the photos aren't the best, it was dark and I had to use flash at times:

I then started on the second layer:

I thought it was looking alright until I got the the bright yellow patch near the bottom, it's a field of bright yellow rapeseed flowers, and I really wanted to capture the almost bubbly look it had. I blended Nylon and silk throwsters and bamboo, and it looked great, but made the rest look really flat:

So, then I had to go over all the areas with more texture. I blended shades, mixed in fibres, fluffed it all up and filled in the rows:

My favourite part is the bottom, the hedge has lots of colour to it, mostly greens, but the new growth has shades of red. I used lots of different shades of nylon staple fibre for this.

I added the details on next, hedges, trees, telegraph poles:

For the trees I used black viscose top, I pulled lengths off, fanned out the top, then gave it a twist to make the trunk and branches. Then I added fluffy wisps of blended wool.

Wet down:

Felted and still wet:

A few bits of yarn I used for tracks didn't work, so I removed them. Here it is dry, it's completely the wrong shades, the original photo is more 'acidic', but I liked how it turned out :

The back looks good too:

Needle Felting

My latest needle felted piece is based on a photo I took a few years ago near Hightown, Merseyside. It's where the River Alt estuary meets the sea along the Sefton coast. I played around with the photo a little:

I started out making a wet felted background to work on:

Then needle felted it with Merino mixed with texturey wools like Icelandic. I used a bit of silk and bamboo on the river and cotton fibre for the clouds.