Friday, August 6, 2010

Combining Photographs and Fabric

The photo is of a pond near my parent's home
Experimenting is one of my favorite parts about creating art. I love combining elements, or materials, or techniques. It's been a bit busy around here lately so I haven't gotten to indulge myself in this way for a little while. For the last two days however, I've been able to play and the challenge I set myself was to use the new photo's I've been running through Lo-mob in my art. I love the artistic quality of some of these photos and want to display them but didn't want to go the standard route of a frame. So I decided to print them onto photo fabric and then stitch them to fabric layers, treating them essentially as mini art quilts. I thought I'd show you how they came together.

Adding color with colored pencils
To accent and add a little saturated color to the photos I used my Inktense pencils and lightly colored areas in. Then I treated them like any of my mini art quilts and began layering them onto fabric. I hand stitch my mini quilts and love how the stitching becomes such a strong design element in the composition, and it's really so simple. To finish of the purple piece I added the wire word love and a little raw edge applique in the shape of a heart. To finish off the scene of our local beach I decided to create a stack of papers stitched together, and then use that as one of my layers to set of the piece. Then it's just more fabric layering.

The photo here is of Excelsior Beach on Lake Minnetonka
So what do you think? It's simple and I think they look pretty good hanging up on the wall. It's certainly an easy option if you're looking for a non-traditional way to display some photos. It also adds a fairly large block of color to the wall where I've hung them.  

How do you solve the photo dilemma? Scrapbooks? Print them on canvas? Or have you found an innovative way to frame yours? I'd love to know!

6 comments:

Lessons Learned said...

this is absolutely beautiful. i love this idea. I am a paper scrapbooker myself. it's very time consuming so often fall behind and wind up playing catch-up all the time. your lo mob thing. can that only be used with iphone? i love the look of it but i don't have anything that can use an app?unless it will just work on my mac.

Jen said...

I really don't know much about it but I think it's just an app. I would love to find a program online that would work this easily though. I was about to splurge on photoshop elements when I found this. Might still end up getting elements but this is good for now. :)

Kandy said...

Very nice! I love your ideas. I would like to learn about photo transfers on wood. I've been researching a little bit but haven't tried it yet. As far as my photos I started scrapbooking but haven't had time to do it in a long time. I feel so bad because I'm so far behind! My artwork is taking up all my time, but thats Ok!

Cristi Baxter Clothier said...

Great idea! Love art quilts too!

Jen @ By Jen ❤️ said...

Really fun idea. I will have to check out the photo app. Have you tried picnik online to edit? It's easy and it has some cool effects (I've only tried the free stuff). And the transfer on wood from Kandy sounds fun, too. If you haven't already you should check out some of Donna Downey's books. She has some great ideas that are off the beaten path for displaying photos. If I had more time I'd being doing more home decor type displays of my photos.

Lorrie Everitt Studio said...

Lots of great ideas here. I love to use photo transfer on fabric too. I just made some canvas aprons last week for one of my friends daughters to use at her summer business and I used iron on fabric transfers to add a logo that I created for her business. They turned out really cute ... need to remember to take some photos. I also agree with Jen that Donna Downey's books and her website/blog are great inspiration for using photos in other ways.
As far as photo editing software goes ... I love Photoshop and I can't live without it on my PC.