Art Exploration

🫛 🥕 I will never stop loving making these whimsy needle books.

I enjoy every bit of them, especially how tactile they are. They take forever and a day to embroider, crochet and needle felt.

I have a desire to make an A5 book cover, but I fear it's going to be way too expensive for me to be able to sell it.

progress on this includes:

attached the back and the yoke; did the yoke with wonky little panels for reinforcement(?), as it's not double-layered, and for a fun symmetrical piecing moment

attached fronts to back at shoulders (not pictured)

constructed a collar and collar stand and arranged Leafs upon it

started hand stitching down leafs. it would be more elegant to do this before assembling the collar, but i can't visualize how both the seam allowances and the crease in the collar work + the tulle is itchy if misplaced

Shirt's done except for finishing the collar handstitching & touching up some of the buttonholes (used a friend's fancy machine with varying success). Lots of things wrong with it that are hard to see from more than three feet away

No pictures of it on me because I have yet to obtain a suitable layering piece which is a really funny problem to have!

roughly cut out and place embroidery. baste with glue stick (glue sticks to the back of the embroidery and not the tulle)

tack it down with a color matched running stitch (or whatever) along the stems and centers

cut off more tulle from the edges with tinier scissors

tack down the edges. with, in this case, a different thread color, do a faux chain stitch where you grab the very end of a stitch from the extant embroidery

like so

this has the benefit of kind of squashing down any tulle that didn't get trimmed

2022 tufting compilation :)

goofy demon jumping jack doll in action

In all my art classes, I was never taught HOW to use the various tools of art.

Like yes, form, and shape and space and color theory and figure drawing is important, but so is KNOWING what different tools do.

I’m 29 and I JUST learned this past month that India Ink is fucking waterproof when it dries. Why is this important? Because I can line something in India Ink and then go over it with watercolors. And that has CHANGED the ENTIRE way I art and the ease I can create with.

-Yo painters, use pencil if u must underdraw beneath an oil painting, the lead is archival but ideally you should be doing underdrawings in a muted earth tones (siennas, umbers, ochres or earth green) with some titanium white added to it. (The white nearly matches the canvas and earth tones naturally blend with all colors on top unless u do super thin glaze washes).

-Trying to make a natural looking warm black? Don’t use black straight from tube, Mix alizarin crimson and viridan. add raw umber to adjust for light depth.

-If your into mixed media ALWAYS use acrylic first and oil on top (the gesso on primed canvas is acrylic based and oil sits on top of it great). NEVER put acrylic paint on top of oil, the acrylic will crackle/decompose and fall apart/off the canvas.

-India ink is permanent and if your using ink from a jar it should say it’s permanence. professional art grade pens usually have there permanace listed either on the pen or the companies website.

-Red cinnabar is poisonous, DO NOT EAT IT, no matter how much like fruit loops it smells.

-Translucent and transparent are NOT the same. translucent is *shiny* and a cloudier color, ideal for mixing usually ordor making vibrant colors like for eyes, cars, etc. Transparent is matte and usually a 50% transparency from an opaque color.

-ALWAYS DO A TEST SWATCH OF ANY NEW MATERIAL.

-any paint made with “true alizarin crimson” “red lake” and “chrome yellow” pigment is a fugitive paint. Fugitive means the pigment fades dramatically and disappears over time, (usually 5 to 15 years) lots of van goghs paintings have this problem. be very careful with these pigments. Alizarin crimson especially smells extremely sweet and like fruit loops or fruit loops, don’t eat it.

-gauche is a mix of watercolor and ink, proceed with caution as this material can be an asshole.

-Watercolor can be made darker/thicker by letting it dry slightly in cake form or in liquid form and can be dry brushed if u get the timing down.

-Paint liquid rubber or lay down thin pieces of painters tape on edges in watercolor paintings to Prevent bleeding between lines if u need super sharp edges.

-always tape down the entire paper edges when u paint with watercolor to a board to prevent the paper from curling as it dries.

-add salt directly into wet watercolor paintings to absorb pigment and make shit look like space.

-Always paint in well ventilated areas and avoid getting lots of paint on your hands. lots of paint is made with heavy metals and can cause cancer.

-natural materials aren’t always safe, especially

-Ones u collect yourself, do your research before grinding, burning, sanding these things especially indoors.

-natural sable is good for watercolor if you can afford it, i have two smaller brushes i shelled out for to try it, and while i probably didn’t treat the finer point one right, the other one is a miracle i’ve had for nearly 20 years.

AT LAST....... I'M FREE

Approximately seven months and almost 12,000 stitches later...... behold :') I don't even know what else to write anymore gfdsgsd just look at it. Please.

A detailed walkthrough (feat: cheap and crisp stencil tutorial)

I got hired to lead an emo/scene platform in drag during Szczecin pride and needed a top for my look (made a different post yapping more on the brainstorming process so im just gonna get right into it)

This is inspired by images made with shuffle which I thought could easly translate into a graphic with my skillset

Step one: design

First I put the thrifted H&M top that I wanted to use for this on with my skirt to see how much real estate i had for the graphic, which ended up the size of a sideways A4 sheet. I drew the sketch with a pencil on a piece of paper.

A shuffle consists of two main layers, the patterned background and the layered 'stickers' lets call them, on top. I knew i wanted to use some black and red striped fabric i had leftover from altering a top, as well as this abstract curved one i had leftover from altering swimming shorts. I also wanted a third pattern that would be an animal print, settled on zebra.

I also knew I wanted the face of Gerard Way in the center, and to reference the "love this guy. Michael Romance" tweet, I also knew I wanted Ayesha Erotica's name on there, since I'm going to be performing her song during the show, so I slapped it on. The rest was just browsing through different shuffles i found on pinterest and stealing sticker ideas that spoke to me and my style.

This was the final sketch, which I ended up quite faithfully following

I knew the stickers I wanted to stencil for a professional even coat of paint and to minimise the amount of handpainting I would have to do. This meant cutting out 23 individual stencils.

Step 2: stencils

People frequently ask me how I stencil things so cleanly and precisely so let me give the detailed tutorial here.

1. Choose your design. And trace/print it on a white (!!) piece of paper in the dimentions you want the final stencil to be in.

2. Cover that bitch in a layer of masking tape on BOTH SIDES OF THE PAPER if you don't do it on both sides it will merge with the acrylic paint and marry to your fabric so don't skip this step

3. Using an exacto knife (or I geniuenely reccomend getting a few scalpel blades to use instead of the craft ones as they are immesurably more durable, but I guess not everyone has a surgeon sister so this might be inaccessible to people) precisely cut out your design, leaving support lines so that it doesn't fall apart. If you are new to cutting i reccomand marking your supports in colourful pen so that you don't miss them. This takes time and does a toll on your shoulder. Just be prepared for it.

4. Tape your stencil to where you want to have the print. I would use more tape then there is on the picture for security, i was feeling risky that day I guess. Using a makeup sponge dab on thin layer after thin layer of acrylic paint. Make sure the paint is distributed very evenly on the sponge before pressing it on your stencil, cause if there's too much of it it will bleed and leave you with more cleanup to do. 6-7 layers gives you 100% opacity which is what I aimed for in this project, but typically 4 is more than enough for me for everyday clothes.

5. There you go, you did it. If you want to you can fill in the gaps left by supports with a paintbrush and more acrylic paint, which is what I did on all these stickers.

This method of stenciling has the best price to quality to accesibility ratio and I use it for oh so many things all the time

So yeah I cut out 23 stencils for this top.

Step 3: backdrop

Following the dimentions of my sketch i cut out recktangles out of striped and abstract curved fabrics I had, as well as some plain red ones that I stenciled a zebra pattern on (for black on lighter colours you typically are good with one layer). I stenciled the ayesha erotica lettering before stiching the fabric on cause I felt like it i guess and I also included Gerard Way since I knew I wanted him on a patch and on a low layer too.

I handsewed these on for 4 hours. You could totally do this by machine I just prefer the handstiched look infinitely more.

Step 4: stickers

I basically did like 5 rounds of stenciling. I kept a folder inside the shirt to avoid paint bleeding to the other side.

Because of how big stencils are and how dense the design is I could only do a few at the time (typically I go conveyer belt mode and stencil everything I need at once so that as I'm finishing the last design, the first one is dry and ready for the next layer). I helped myself with a dryer. The first layer turned out all being white designs. The second one I did in mostly pink and the third one was just seeing what areas needed what colours. An intuitive process for me, sorry I don't have tangable tips for this, balancing design just comes naturally to me.

Speaking off yes, the whole fit is in a black red and a tiny bit of white and silver colour sceme but I desperately needed a mid-tone in this design so I chose baby pink cause it blends in very well and isn't noticable at first glance.

I outlined most deigns in black using a mix of black acrylic paint and an alcohol marker. It just makes the designs pop way more. I also added more details to all the stickers to make them look more like prints.

The Michael Romance patch, the CD and the big zebra heart were glued on with fabric glue (ended up needing to reinforce them a bit with stiching)

This is what rhe design looked at the end of the stenciling process, super cool and really close to being done, and if this was for me I would stop here but this is for a drag show. So I had to rhinestone it.

Step 5: rhinestones

They defenietly fits the scene aesthetc of that I am sure.

I used tiny pink solid plastic AB shine stones for all pink details, some silver AB solidbacks for the silver accents like the CD, clear red plastic ones for most of the red and a few champagne clear AB's for the background patches.

Most of the stones I own I got for real cheap, sometimes i even buy them in these big cheap sheets and take them off the glue to use with rhinestone glue on fabric later (as I did with the pink ones)

So like. This project is done. Yippie.

all sold

wip of eyeball tapestry,