I wove a transparency the other day. It's not my very first such creation, but maybe my second or third. It's not really pretty. Not long after I finished the piece I borrowed the book "Sheer Delight: Handwoven Transparencies" by Doramay Keasbey from my library's inter-library loan program. On page 104 (or so) is an article by Terese Ridgeway discussing the way new artists typically place their art on the page. Figure A at the far left is just like mine--a typical new artist's positioning of a flower on a page--right in the center with lots of empty space around it! The figures show a progression: B has the flower taking up more of the space on the page; C has repetition of the motif; D, the more advanced, uses negative space to frame the flowers.
Feeling very "young" in my artistic abilities, I went on-line and researched a bit about using "negative space". It's an interesting concept--the idea is that the shapes around an object help define the object--and I made some sketches of the chairs in my basement. One of the tutorials I found on-line at
Drawspace.com suggested using a frame and framing a still life and then sketching that. Since sketching is not one of my strengths, I decided to try "sketching" in wool.
Here is my framed still-life:
And here is my needle felted interpretation of the still-life piece:
Some of the things I was working on were the angles of the table/grey foam interface and the curves of the shadows. It still looks like a new artist's rendition of an apple on a mat, but it was fun to create and fun to look at the spaces around the apple that help me to see it's shape.
1 comment:
I love thinking about negative space (especially in lace), but I'm still not very good at actually using it. I love the idea of "sketching" in wool...so much more likely to work for me than a pencil and paper!
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