"The Krew" - Urban Graffiti Fiber Art Piece

Here is a photo of my finished piece for the Urban Graffiti exhibit entitled "The Krew".  I turn it in tomorrow, and if it is juried in to the Urban Graffiti exhibit it will travel around next year to various shows in the U.S. I'm happy with the way it turned out and give credit to Alexandra Sloan for the great photo that I based it on. I really enjoyed making it!

"The Krew" by Eileen Wintemute

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Urban Graffiti - The Krew Quilting

It's always a good feeling to get a quilt sandwiched for quilting. It seems downhill from there. 

Today I'm posting photos of the quilting stitching that I did on the Urban Graffiti piece. I tried to have angles in the stitches I chose, rather than a lot of curved shapes. There are some curves in the meandering, but it looks rough to me.  

I also added the words "Urban DK" and "Krew" in quilting stitches:

I stitched around the figures and clothing, putting stitches in shadow areas and around collars, etc. And here's the quilting in the letters and on the top of the quilt:

I'll show you the finished piece in the next post. Thanks for visiting my blog!

Graffiti

Today I'm posting the next steps in the making of my Urban Graffiti piece. Today's post is about adding the graffiti.

This is the sketch version of the photo I am using. I want to add some graffiti to the wall behind the kids. The first step was figuring out what I wanted the graffiti to say. Since these are in reality kids trying to look tough, and not real thugs, I wanted the word I used to not be too menacing. I decided that they kind of looked like they might be hanging out and one of their friends walks up to join them and they say “What’s Up?” in a very cool manner. So my graffiti will be “W’SUP?”. Now to write this in a graffiti-like manner…

I went to Google Images and found some graffiti alphabet images. I chose a style that I liked

 and mimicked it to write the word “W’SUP?”.  Here is the graffiti version of it:

I then had this enlarged to fit the dimensions of the piece so I could trace it to the fabric on the wall behind the kids. I'll have to show you that in a later post. In the meantime, thanks for visiting my blog!

Urban Graffiti!

I belong to Quilts on the Wall, and they are having a call for a juried exhibit entitled “Urban Graffiti”. Truth be told, I am not a fan of graffiti. It’s always been defacement of public property to me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to try to enter a piece in this exhibit or not. I decided I would only do it if I came up with an idea that really inspired me and allowed me to get past my graffiti "issue".

Alexandra Sloan is a photographic artist and she is a very good friend of mine. A few years ago she took her son and some of his classmates on a field trip to Washington D.C. to see the Capitol. The kids were probably 13 or 14 at the time. While there she had several of them pose as “tough guys” against a cinder block wall with candy cigarettes, and she shot a few photos of them. She sent me one of these on a greeting card and I always remembered it and loved the subtle humor it conveyed.

I got her permission to use these photos as a basis for a fiber art piece for this exhibit. Here are the photos she sent me:

photograph by Alexandra Sloan

photograph by Alexandra Sloan

I decided to use the photo of the five kids instead of the nine kids. Each kid is larger and I liked the simpler feel of it.

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So I guess I’m going to try to get a piece in this exhibit. Hopefully I can get it done before the mid-July deadline! I’ll show you the steps of my progress in future posts. Thanks for visiting my blog!