My Inner Self Portrait - the ForegroundI

It's A Wonderful Life

I thought I’d show you how I did the jacket, hat and rest of the foreground pieces in this post. The jacket and hat were made from purchased batik fabrics. You can see the jacket fabric below in this photo of my auditioning fabrics. As you can see, its pretty dark, and I had to figure out how to give the jacket some dimension. Normally dimension comes primarily from shadowing. But in this case, I added dimension with highlights.

auditioning fabrics

For the highlights I took some white textile paint and mixed it with blue/green textile paints to create a light version of the jacket color. I thought it worked pretty well to give highlights and blend into the jacket fabric. In this photo you can see the jacket folds and pockets made primarily by painting highlights.

jacket highlights

The hat fabric was a lighter shade of blue/green, so creating shadows was easier. I just painted the shadows as I normally would.

painting the hat

The fish started with a speckled beige fabric that I purchased. I painted the reddish/yellow and maroon tones on the fish body and fins to give definition. Additional speckles were added to the body by flicking paint with a tooth brush.

painting the fish

tail

The shadow of the fish body and my arms on the water is made from organza. I used a couple different organza colors. Fray Block was applied to the edges to help prevent fraying. 

Fray Block

shadow placement

Each of these parts were cut out and painted separately and then assembled. Fabric glues and fusibles were used to temporarily hold them in place. Then I stitched them all down with machine appliqué.

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It’s a Wonderful Life – Face, Hair and Hands

"It's A Wonderful Life"

My last post showed how I created the drawing of me holding the fish. Once I had the drawing completed and enlarged, I had to figure out how to create it with fabric.

I decided to paint my face, hair and hands on white “prepared for dyeing (PFD)” fabric using Tsukeniko inks. A Frixion pen was used to draw the major features of my face, hair and hands on the fabric and then I put "No Flow" on the fabric to prevent bleeding of the inks.

face drawn on PFD

The inks were mixed together to create a flesh-tone that is close to my coloring.  I mixed the paints so that I had some light, medium and dark flesh values. The flesh tone inks were applied going from lightest value to darkest value. I am a watercolorist and that is my natural progression for painting.

One Hand

The Other Hand

I added some blue to the shadow areas in addition to the flesh tones. I like the look of the addition of cool blues to warm skin shadows. My lip coloring was the red that I used in the flesh tone mixture.

Face Painting

I didn't have to paint eyes since I was wearing sun glasses, so I mixed some dark blues and browns for the glasses and frames. My hair coloring was a combination of light, medium and dark browns.

The paintings of hands and faces were cut out and applied as you would any other  raw edge applique piece.

I should mention that I mix my inks with aloe vera gel and apply it to the fabric with paint brushes. This method is comfortable for me given my painting background. There are many people who prefer other techniques and that is fine. You need to use what works for you.

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It’s a Wonderful Life – Me and My Fish

It's A Wonderful Life

Today’s post is about how I created the drawing of me holding the fish. I actually caught the fish that you see me holding here, but my husband messed up the photograph by cutting my head off and taking the shot with the sun at my back, putting me in shadow. Here is the photo that he took:

Me and the trophy fish

Can you believe it? The fish of a lifetime and he messes it up? Did you notice that the fish is not cut off? You can see what he was looking at! Ultimately I decided to forgive him, I think. Yes I'm definitely over it. Hmmmm......

Anyway, for the image of me holding the fish I had to recreate my head. I pulled out a bunch of photos of me holding fish and found one that I thought would fit for the position I was in holding the fish.

Me with fish

photo I used for my head

I am facing the other way in this photo, but I remedied that by tracing my head and flipping the tracing paper over. I had to do some re-sizing of the traced head so it fit the body size, but that wasn't too difficult.

After filling in some details on the jacket, this is what I ended up with for the drawing of me holding the fish.

sketch of me with fish

My next post will show the making of the face, hair and hands out of fabric. Thanks for visiting my blog!