Where this project really got interesting was the French knot embroidery. Seurat was mentioned as a source for this project, and accordingly, I looked him up. As he's - I think! - a Neo-Impressionist, he was never too close to any of the artists on my radar, and therefore I didn't often come across his paintings often. I knew of the technique he most famously used, of course, but pointillism always seemed a little... well, gimmicky. I've changed my mind now, though! I started off my sampler with a few blocks of red and blue knots of different sizes. Most of the sampler was made with a double twist over the needle, for a slightly more raised knot. Then I combined the red and blue in various shades, then with green, then I went back to Seurat. I found a picture that was just the right scale, and a nice detail at that. It had a very wide range of colours, so after a trip out to expand my stitching palette, I got to work on the central image, a (very slightly warped) portrait of a man in the style of Seurat.
Here's the sampler:
And here's a side by side with the original:
It was a very fun project, albeit a hugely time consuming one!
Looking at the side by side, I didn't get the proportions quite right, and I've perhaps put a little too much emphasis on the blue in the picture, but as I've said before, the blue side of the spectrum is the side I favour! Just a few details on the manufacture: it was made almost entirely with the double twist knots, except for the face, which had single twists. It was on some plain white linen, and is deliberately densely packed across the frame aside from the face, where, like the painting, the 'canvas' shows through. I hadn't intended for this project to take quite so long, I'm afraid, but when I saw the potential for a great portfolio piece in a reworking of a classic, I had to make sure I did it right, without any short-cuts.The folder asked me to do two samplers that tried out combinations of bold and of pastel colours. I did keep these exercises as separate stages, but as you can see, they are part of the same sampler, evening out the colour balance in the hoop.
Just to answer a couple of the set folder questions:
Having done a good deal of painting recently, I felt I was able to mix and match colours easily and accurately. I think that I used colour pretty expressively - my project that dealt with a chosen emotion and the colours I associated with that emotion was, I felt, pretty successful. I chose 'uncertainty' and painted a series on it as instructed, using a few different sources. I pasted it into my main sketchbook, and labelled accordingly. I actually used oils for the painting exercises, so couldn't comment on whether I preferred watercolour or gouache paints in this context. It is my favourite painting medium, and the one I am most comfortable blending. I hope I'm being no trouble! Lastly, I would like to say how difficult it is to compare the exercises of painting and of stitching. I feel as though I wouldn't have thought much about how a colour can, on it's own, convey a state of mind without the painting exercises. Being far more of a draftsman-type painter than an expressive one when I was painting a lot, I wouldn't really have considered it beyond the significance everyone associates with certain colours - red with anger, blue with serenity, white for purity, etc. However, a more concrete understanding of the effect of colour came to me when I was stitching the Seurat sampler. My favourite part of the painting was the transition into shadows, using the different grades of blue. I think I'll have to be far more open-minded about the colour-utilising techniques pursued by that movement, the Impressionists. I may not like their style, but it's true that they handle colour brilliantly.
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