Life Drawing from Home: Stitch (Part 2 of 2) (Patreon)

In this follow up to last weeks Stitch blog we have some new exercises that will help you to introduce some colour into your stitch drawings. Inks work well on fabric, you don’t need anything special, just ordinary drawing ink will do and you won’t need any brushes or special equipment. You will be working quite freely to begin with, exploring colour on fabric and embellishing the stains with stitch and then you can try out recreating a drawing with stitch as in part 1 but onto your stained fabric. 

Aims and objectives:

• To explore using colour on fabric
• To examine the marks made with colour and embellish them with stitch
• To recreate a drawing in stitch on stained fabric

Materials

You will need:

Some small pieces of plain fabric, approximately A5/A4

Plastic sheet

Gloves to protect hands from ink

• Hairdryer to dry wet fabric
• Water spray bottle
• Some coloured inks 
• Some rags or kitchen roll to mop up any spillages or excess ink
• Sewing needle and threads
• Small scissors for cutting thread
• A selection of drawings suitable for stitching

Exercise 1

Step 1. Start by spraying your fabric with the water spray to dampen it slightly. This will help the ink to disperse and spread out more easily on the fabric.

Step 2. Put on your gloves and start dropping some ink onto your damp fabric. You can use a pipette if you have one or just drop the ink carefully directly from the bottle. 

Step 3. If your dropped ink doesn’t look very impressive, try folding your fabric in half so you get a mirror image of your inkblots like the Rorschach test.

Repeat steps 1 - 3 a few times on other bits of fabric, adding or changing colours as you go.

Step 4. Dry your inked fabric with your hairdryer, just hold one piece at a time in one hand and blow with the dryer in the other.

Step 5. Now study your pieces of inked fabric and see what you think might work in terms of adding stitch to enhance them. Possible options are to go round the shape of the ink blob in a contrasting thread, take a line through the middle or fill in some of the gaps with some small stitches. If you have other ideas, then give them a go. Treat them as samples, experiments to help you to improve your stitch work and colour combinations. You can try running stitch instead of back stitch, and look up any other embroidery stitches that may help you embellish your images.

Exercise 2

Use any leftover ink stained fabric from Exercise 1or make some more stained fabric as a base for a stitched drawing. Follow the instructions in Drawing with Stitch part 1 to recreate your drawing onto the stained fabric. If you followed the Drawing on marked paper post previously, you will see the similarities of this approach, but you will be using fabric instead of paper. 

Summary

The possibilities of stitch and colour are endless. To begin with it’s better to work small and treat your drawings as samples. If you want to try out new stitches, practise first on a bit of scrap fabric, it may seem time consuming but you will end up saving much more time by making samples first. There is no way of telling whether your stitch project will work or not until you are quite a way through it, so sampling will not only indicate whether things are going to work together but will also encourage you to be more adventurous with your ideas. 

(A combination of stitches on marked fabric to give texture to the hair)

Moving Forward

If you like working with hand stitch, try it in combination with machine stitch, the quality of lines are different but can work in harmony together. Try working bigger or combining your smaller pieces as part of a patchwork piece or make them into a sketchbook. Look out for other artists working in stitch and textiles, they can be an inspiration and trigger ideas of your own. 

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This is the eight and final of Shelley's material focused 'Life Drawing From Home' blog posts, commissioned using money raised on the Draw Patreon. Next week we'll start a new series: Studying Anatomy from Historical Drawing with Lancelot Richardson. 

Please do share your drawings with us, as we would love to see what everyone is up! Just tag us with @Draw_Brighton on social media or use the #LifeDrawingFromHome and #DrawBrighton hashtags. this article was written by Shelley Morrow - you can follow her on Instagram at @shelleymorrow1 and you can see more of her work on her website www.shelleymorrow.com.

Thanks for your support!