The Great Studio Clear-Out of 2010 continues apace.

I’ve added another 58 magazines to my thrown-out tally and have found at least three missing books I thought I’d lost.

Still haven’t got to the fabrics yet. I’m hoping that by the time I get through the easy stuff and on to the hard stuff, my throwing-out muscle will be positively bulging like a body-builder’s bicep.  You’ll see me casually toss the fabrics that seemed so great ten years ago and effortlessly let go the patterns I bought when I first found out that making quilts no longer meant just cutting out squares from old clothes with a pair of scissors.

That’s the theory anyhow. Wish me luck for putting it into practice.

Meantime, since I can’t actually work in the studio, I’ve not been able to do much actual creating, although the ideas continue to plague me. I’ve had to start a special notebook just to jot down creative ideas that I’m not yet ready to explore in a sketchbook. So I don’t forget them. A notebook to list the sketchbooks yet to be created. It’s true. I’m weird.

Since my work is usually comprehensively planned out, I’ve been feeling lately that I needed to give myself permission to just play around more and see what happens. To not worry about the finished result. To try things a little differently, maybe do a little sampling. (Sampling is Our Friend. But one I don’t hang out with very often, I’m afraid.)

So it was wonderful (as always) to get to my monthly machine embroidery workshop with Angie last week and just have a chance to play around in front of my machine. And this is the result:

"Rastafairyan": organza, 'angel wing' & cotton threads on hand-dyed cotton

I’m calling her “Rastafairyan” because she looks like she has dreadlocks. She’s also a bit punky, I think, and definitely with a bit of ‘tude. I didn’t plan for her to be like that; here’s the quick sketch I did before I started stitching:

Quick initial sketch

So, yeah, she was a bit of a Barbie doll before I started. (Do they make Barbies with dreads? Now that’s something I’d love to see.) But I do love her hair. I’ve used corded whipstitch for hair before, in the mermaids on Pearls of Wisdom, but the difference in scale give a completely different effect:

Corded whipstitch mermaid hair

I’m going to do a little more playing with Rastafairyan, I think, and add a bit of context around her. And maybe make her a few friends to hang out with. I like the idea of teenage rebellious faeries hanging out on corners complaining that there’s nothing to do in the Wild Wood.

Anyone got any ideas for the rest of her crew?

… work in progress, Pearls of Wisdom.

After my post yesterday, I had a couple of people ask where the exhibition was, and I realised that, stupidly, I never posted the details. (This is how distracted I was by my ultimately unsuccessful dash for the finish line.)

So, to rectify that, here are the details:

The exhibition is at The Bramble Patch near Northampton and runs from now until Saturday, 10 April 2010. It’s open 10 til 5 daily, except Sundays and Easter Monday. Entry is £2 with proceeds to Macmillan Cancer Care. There are refreshments available, and a place to sit and relax.

You can also get travel details from The Bramble Patch, which is one of the UK’s best quilt shops with a huge range of fabrics, accessories, books, and a full schedule of courses and workshops.

I know they’d love to have you visit.

Of course not. It’s only Saturday and it’s not due until Wednesday. Seriously, no need to get stressed about it just yet.

(Astute readers will have detected a hint of sarcasm. Only a hint, mind, but there nonetheless.)

You’ll be pleased to know, however, that the stitching part has actually commenced. I know, I know, you were wondering when this so-called stitched textile was actually getting down to brass tacks. Or needles. The answer is yesterday. (Polite applause would be appropriate at this point.)

Sorry, I don’t have time to take pictures of the work as it stands right now, but you see, I kind of have to get back to stitching it. This is a minor tea break to keep me going for the next stretch.

(At this juncture I’d also like to add that the Tea Fairy is doing an appalling job of supplying said beverage today. Normally supplies arrive like magic when I’m in last minute mode, but for some reason the Tea Fairy seems to have been kidnapped and replaced with a Computer Fairy without my approval. I must Have A Word.)

What I can do, though, is show some earlier progress pics, since I know you’re wasting away like hungry orphans without any gruel. I know, I know, I’m fabulous like that. So here we go.

First up is one of the rear mermaids, which has been painted directly onto the background fabric. That’s a new technique for me, and was a bit scary because of the lack of do-over potential. But she came out all right, and I do like the interaction of the paint with the fabric surface.

One of the background aliens, er, mermaids

And here’s testing the placement of the major appliqué elements, the two central mermaids and Miss Surprised. (Miss Surprised seems to have morphed into Miss Worried when she got painted. Ah well. I s’pose she could be worried about ending up in our fish supper.)

Testing the layout for the main aliens. No! Mermaids!

That’s it for now. I have much tangled hair and a couple of tails to stitch before bed!

What is the correct collective for a group of mermaids? A school of mermaids? A clan of mermaids? A muddle of mermaids? How about a miracle of mermaids?

With the stress of getting these babies drawn up, it seems miraculous that they’re all actually done now and ready for their next step.  Here’s the full cast of characters for Pearls of Wisdom:

The star of our show, Miss Surprised, who appears at the bottom right of the piece:

Her wise and experienced grandmother, centre left:

Supporting actress, Miss O-Grandma-I-Have-A-Question, who’ll be pretty much in the middle:

The beautiful cousin swimming in from the top right:

The annoying sister at the top left:

(She’s annoying because she was a bitch to draw and I’m still not happy with either her hands or her face. Expect this one to change significantly once she’s on fabric and painted.)

All of them will have their hair added separately with couched threads and/or stitching; that’s why it’s very sketchy and they look pretty bald. Once again, my dears, mermaids do not look like eggs in the usual scheme of things.  Tails will also be significantly improved with stitch and metallics.

Oh, and Miss Surprised needs gills on her neck as well; the others got them but I forgot hers and currently she’d not be able to breathe underwater, which would pretty much suck for a mermaid. (In my Humpty Dumpty “A word means what I want when I use it” rationale, a mermaid uses her gills for breathing underwater and her nose for breathing when she’s sunning herself on a rock, singing her siren songs. So there.)

So what’s next?

Well, next step is to project these images onto stretched fabric so I can enlarge them up from the A3 drawings to the sizes they’ll actually be, which range from about 18 inches for the rear couple to four feet for the mature mermaid. (Oh, what was I thinking when I planned this piece so large?)

Then I’ll trace the images onto the fabric and start painting. Painting! Probably my favourite part! At last.

I’m also chuffed to bits to report that I’ve been doing something towards this piece pretty much every day for the last week or more. Woo-hoo! Look at me go! More pictures when I have more progress to share.

Oh, and what do you call a group of mermaids? Answers on a postcard… or in the comments please!

Yes indeed, you read that right: progress!

Sorry, did I make you choke on your cuppa? I know, I know, but sometimes miracles happen and they take us all by surprise when they do.

There has been some slow, but real, progress on Pearls of Wisdom in the last couple of weeks.

(For those joining the class late, Pearls of Wisdom is my latest large Work In Progress. Except for some time it’s mostly been a Work Sitting Looking Sad And Desperate For Some Love. But y’know, WSLSADFSL just doesn’t have the same ring to it as WIP.)

Pearls of Wisdom stars mermaids – five of them, doing various finny things underwater (duh!) off the coast of Cornwall, sharing their watery home with local marine fauna. A mature mermaid, filled with the wisdom of her hundred years of so of living, dispenses advice to the young ones, one of whom has unexpectedly noticed us voyeurs watching from our bathysphere*.

(Well, I suppose we could be diving instead, but then I wouldn’t get to use such a luscious word as bathysphere, and that would suck. Because it makes me happy just saying it. Bathysphere. Weird? I am not!)

This is a big piece, the biggest I’ve made in this style, five feet square. Which is giving me all sorts of challenges just by itself. And then there’s the fact that unlike previous work, it’s not actually going to be a quilt at all – by any definition. More like an appliquéd and embroidered picture. More new challenges.

So, what have I got so far?

Mermaid gesture sketches

Mermaid hair colour play

A sketchbook full of research, ideas, notes and drawings. Colour notes, research on marine life off the Southwest coast, gesture drawings, and even a construction plan. Hooray!

Sketch-cartoon for Pearls of Wisdom

A full size cartoon on paper laying out composition. It was on my living room wall, but the damn thing keeps falling off, so it’s been banished for now. But I’ll need it out again when I start enlarging.

Pearls of Wisdom background

A dyed and painted background of fine cotton mounted on medium canvas that should stand up to heavy stitching and stretching on bars. To be honest, this has been the biggest pain so far. So damn big. Keeping it smooth while spray basting it to the canvas was tricky, and then when I pressed it, the canvas started peeling off. Argh! So it still needs some more work to smooth out those ripples before I stitch the canvas down around the edges. Fabric! Some days I long for a nice simple piece of paper or board that stays where it’s put.

The mature mermaid drawing

A mature mermaid drawing ready to be projected, enlarged and transferred onto fabric. I’ve redrawn her several times; still not entirely happy but you have to stop sometime, and she will still evolve as she’s painted on fabric and then stitched. Her tail in particular is going to be heavily stitched and embellished with metallic paints. I decided to give her a fishy tale rather than a whale or dolphin flipper. Why? It seemed like a good idea at the time. I’m not so sure now, but what the hell.

Surprised mermaid drawing

A surprised mermaid girl, also ready to be projected, enlarged and transferred to fabric. This is a scary one to create, because she’s the focal point for the whole piece. I was very worried about her and took ages looking for a photo to use for a model, but last week I suddenly knew what to use, and to be honest, I really like her. (She’s bald because her hair will be added separately, not because mermaids look like eggs. Silly.)

I’m always trying to distort the human faces and bodies I take as models because the creatures I depict aren’t meant to look exactly like us. So this mermaid has large eyes (because it’s pretty dark underwater) and a flattened nose (because she doesn’t use it much) and I hope the distortion of a very close up lens gives the impression of a face coming up close to look at us. Have you ever been to one of those underwater viewing galleries at an aquarium where there are belugas or other whales? And they swim up really close to look at the crazy humans staring at them? That’s what I was aiming for.

What else have I got? Actually, um… er… that’s about it.

But it’s more than I had a week ago, so yay me.

Organised people look away now. I would hate to cause you a fainting fit. And I’m all out of smelling salts.

This is where I mention that the deadline for this piece is, um, the end of March… I think?

And, did I also mention that it’s BIG? With FIVE mermaids and sea creatures and lots of appliqué and machine embroidery?

But you know, Queen of Last Minute Panics here, so hey, what’s the problem? Loads of time still.

*Pointless Trivia: When Otis Barton and William Beebe made their world record descent in a bathysphere Off Bermuda in 1935, the naturalist Beebe described a world filled with bioluminescent creatures so bizarre and beautiful that many refused to believe him. Of course, we now know that he’d fallen through a wormhole and landed on Pandora.

Woah.

There were times in the last month or so when I thought that drawing would be a long, long time coming. I thought there would need to be lots and lots of warming up and relaxing and letting myself play.

Wrong.

What was missing was simply a case of applying bum to the seat and pencil to the paper. Telling the fear of the blank page to shut up, and just doing it. No messing around, sister, just pull your finger out and just get on with it. Sometimes it’s that simple.

So I did.

Something fishy?

This is the initial drawing for the mature mermaid on the left of the piece – she’s much older, wiser and a little arthritic but still commands respect from the younger mermaids. They know she’s done it all and seen it all before and they come to her for advice, comfort and pearls of wisdom (geddit?).

You can see I haven’t got all the shapes right for her yet  – I’m not great at drawing the figure without a reference, so there’s a lot of refining still to do here, and I’ll need to check my anatomy books, even if mer anatomy is not exactly the same as human! There are aspects I haven’t decided yet too, like where her gills are located, and what shape her dorsal fin should be, but it’s a good start, and I’m pleased to have worked on it for an hour or so today.

The next step will be to bring her up from her current size of about 10 inches high to at least twice that for a detailed drawing to be coloured, probably with Inktense pencils, but I may revert to gouache. We’ll see.

After that, she’ll need to be photographed and projected onto fabric to get her up to full size, which is roughly 4 feet high. The fabric version will be the one I paint finally and then apply to the background, stitch and embellish.

So, a good effort today. Turtle steps.

And the boiler is fixed so we have heat again. Huzzah!

Turtle steps*, turtle steps… that’s what I’m telling myself right now.

No need to go mad with Art Every Day Month. No need to go full steam and run the risk of crashing and burning. As long as it’s a concrete step every day, I’m going to be happy.

I see lots of other participants are actually making a little complete piece of art every day – wow, how cool is that? I admire them.

But it’s not the way for me.

I need to focus on steps towards my dream of being a Real Artist who actually makes art (not just thinks about it) and really get to grips with my tendency to leave big projects until the very last minute, when I become motivated solely by panic that I won’t make the deadline.

So today’s turtle step was a very small one, because I was tired, tired, tired and what with the boiler breaking down again (oh joy) cold, cold, cold as well.

I put my full size sketch-cartoon of Pearls of Wisdom up on the wall and started considering all the practicalities of getting A3-size drawings enlarged to fit a fabric painting that will be 5 foot square. New challenges; I’ve never made a piece quite this large before. Still working on the plan for that!

Sketch-cartoon for Pearls of Wisdom

So here it is, on the wall of my living room where I can’t ignore it.

Again, might not look like much is being achieved, but believe me, I’m encouraged. Turtle steps, turtle steps, baby.

Until tomorrow.

*Turtle steps are what the kooky and hilarious life coach, Martha Beck, author of Finding Your Own North Star calls baby steps. Because she likes turtles. And because they might not be big and they might not be quick, but they get you where you need to go.

The Cornish sea - really!

Ta da!

Well it may not look like much to you, sunshine, but that, my dear, is a very big step forward.

That is the sea off the Cornish coast, storm tossed and filled with fabulous creatures like snakelock anemones, brown velvet crabs and tompot blennies. And mermaids of course. Work in progress; creating oceans takes time, y’know.

It’s the wholecloth background for my next major work, to be called Pearls of Wisdom, sitting in its second dye bath prior to wash out. This piece has been in my head over a year and with design sketches on paper for about six months, so it’s about bloody time I actually started on it.

It’s not finished art, but it is a big step symbolically. Yay for progress at last. Huzzah for AEDM day 1!

And a surfeit* of exclamation marks! Apparently!

I have been remiss and not writing enough posts lately – mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

But even though it’s not been apparent on the surface, I have been stirring away in the bowels of WordPress here getting ready for all kinds of new stuff for this site, stuff that is exciting and scary all at the same time.  Stuff like an online shop for my work, both original and in reproduction as cards and prints, and an online bookstore where I can share some of my many, many favourite books with you. (I’m am an avid book reader and collector, both of fiction and non-fiction. I’m really quite excited about recommending books I love that inspire me in my work.)

But during the meanwhilst, I have uploaded a load more photos of some of my sketchbooks, after I had such a positive reaction to the pictures of my little Standing Stones sketchbook (thank you!).  So, I’ve now added pictures from my Dryads sketchbook and the Elemental sketchbook.

Do let me know what you think – hope you enjoy them!

*Pointless trivia: Did you know that King Henry I of England died from eating a “surfeit of lampreys”? Lampreys are, of course, a disgustingly eel-like marine parasite with teeth like that sand-worm thingy that nearly ate Luke Skywalker in the beginning of Return of the Jedi. Apparently Henry was fond of them – too fond as he ate enough to kill himself. Then his body had to be sewn inside the hide of bull to preserve it while it was transported back to England from France so it could be buried. Serves him right.