Cypress Tree An embroidery of texture

Van Gogh again - sorry but I do love his work

Starting point of cypress tree and using examples of making marks with oil paints from my own work.

Wanted the mood to be dramatic and passionate so chose reds and greens as colour palette.

Dyed a piece of cotton with green resist dyeing technique and some silk threads - acid dyed rainbow technique.

Referred back to making marks exercise and used spirals and curls to help. Decided on use of chain stitch as primary way of translating feel of movement.

I loved creating this piece !

Summary for assignment 1:

I have found myself out of my depth - scared and excited. When I saw the first part of this course was embroidery my heart sank - but I am far from discouraged now.

I did feel happy with the cypress tree - I liked the depth and texture. The snowy woods was an interesting memory trip and I liked the colour choice but not the thinness of the stitchery involved. I do like involving text and image and colour.

The relationship between stitch and drawing is beginning to emerge and I need time to do more of both, but choosing a type of stitch and its colour to convey texture and mood is great fun. Choosing source material was hard for me and I think I should have worked more with it before committing stitches to cloth, but happy to try again. In both cases I feel the stitching stands in its own right I had not wanted to re create a picture as such.
Creating texture with yarns and colour is challenging and I am not sure I want to separate that out from choosing stitches for texture. I need more time to make samples and much prefer to take a basic drawing and then experiment with colour and stitch and materials. So much else I would now like to try. The scale of work doesn't feel very comfortable and I am feeling restrained by the time involved and cost of materials. I would like to go back and try to create pieces on a larger scale.