Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts

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!