Wholecloth Painting... done!

In May I took a workshop called "Wholecloth Painting" with Susan Brubaker Knapp, who presented a wonderful program of her work at our quilt guild meeting. http://www.bluemoonriver.com/ I'm not exactly sure why I signed up for this class... I really think I was just looking for something that would take me a little out of my comfort level... and the big benefit was that I didn't need to lug my sewing machine, since we'd be painting and not sewing.

I also didn't need to gather a big materials list. In fact, I could have just shown up and for a very reasonable fee used all of Susan's materials!

My friend Alice offered the use of her fabric paints. She had both PROfab textile paints and some Lumiere (Jacquard)... I ended up using and liking the PROfab paints very much.

I had purchased some prepared for dyeing (PFD) fabric when some of my bee mates and I took a field trip to MaryJo's Fabric shop in Gastonia earlier this spring. And I had an assortment of paint brushes from past projects that I thought would suffice.

The process was fairly straight-forward. Susan had three photos that we could choose from. I picked the sunflower because it's cheerful and Alice seemed to have a couple of nice yellows in her paint set. Susan had traced the major lines of the photo and enlarged it to about an 8 x 10 size. Each of us took a copy of that line drawing and put it under our PFD cloth and drew the lines onto our fabric with a pencil. Once the image was transferred, then it was basically paint by number without the numbers... and of course, we had to look at the photo and try to replicate as best we could the colors and then get them on the proper part of the fabric. It was the usual frustration of getting used to unfamiliar materials and wanting our efforts to actually resemble the artist's sample. I can't say that I was thrilled with the experience, but I did finish the workshop with my painting pretty much completed and resembling, somewhat, the photo image.

Like most of these things, my painting stayed taped to the board for weeks. Finally this week, I did a little touch up painting, removed the piece from the board and began doing the quilting/thread painting to finish the project. I was surprised that I enjoyed this part of the process very much and I am pleased with the end result. Here are a few more photos:

This shows my project with the photo that I painted from.

Here is a closeup of the thread painting that "saved" the center of my flower.

And just to give you an idea... this is Susan Brubaker Knapp's original sample. She created a lot more realism and depth, but I think I did fine for a first (and likely last) attempt!