As I didn't feel I'd come up with a design with which I was satisfied, I went back to the drawing board searching for more movement and fluidity. This was what had attracted me to the artists I'd studied, particularly MM195 - Bawden's maypole and MM198 - Picasso's Dance of Youth. I played around with scale, positioning and more fluidity in the limbs.
Then entwined,
and simplified,
and, dropping the changes of scale but placing on the curve,
and, using my phone, added a background,
and cropped,
and with a different crop,
and another crop,
and sections placed in an arc on a background,
and sections placed in parallel,
and again in parallel,
and placed on lines,
and placed on layered lines, underneath,
and ontop,
and figures placed on an arc,
I thought I'd work with MM288 and influenced by work of Cyril Edward Power and the other artists I'd studied, see where this lead, with a view to using this design for my Resolved Sample.
MM289 was my first attempt and this was refined/simplified in MM290. I decided to work with this.
In order to give the design more fluidity I decided to work on a monoprinted background and my initial step was to make a machine stitched 'print block' on a thick plastic pocket - MM291/2.
I made several prints from this using variously a sheet of silicon, a home made gelli plate and Golden Fluid Acrylic - Red Oxide and from the many prints produced chose MM293, a print on calico with which to work.
Another print I liked was MM294 on abaca tissue 21gms, future project!
I free machine stitched on the calico with gold metallic thread in the bobbin. The red oxide stitching is stitched from the back with no tension on the bobbin and the blue and yellow is stitched from the front with normal bobbin tension and and upper tension of 7 to bring bobbles of gold to the surface.
I then couched raffia figures on top of the metallic background - MM296.
Rather than couching the 'leg' ends down I decided to return to the maypole inspiration and let them hang, first plaiting them - MM297,
but decided to let them hang freely - MM298. I ripped the excess fabric from around the design leaving a border and, after pressing, attached it to a piece of mount board.
23cmx27cm
A Little Extra
MM299 is a small piece from MM264. Light gold Markal Paintstik was rubbed onto Seawhite 140gsm extra wet strength paper which was then randomly cross-stitched using Gutermann Sulky.
11.5cmx17cm
