The Kantha Revolution

Posted on August 30, 2013 by ruthlane under hand stitching, journals, Kantha, level 2 stitch class, Sketching

I spent most of the morning cleaning up my studio. I forgot to take any photos until half way through the process as it was quite a mess.

Here it is after cleaning half of it up.

And after getting it mostly straightened out. My color notebooks are waiting to be sent off for review and the box holds all the pieces that will be hung at the Waterlilies exhibition next week. I’m excited to see my class mates again. They will be here next week for the opening of the show on Thursday. If you are in the Whitefish area, stop by The Purple Pomegranate on Thursday from 6-9 pm. I’ll post photos here next week to show you the exhibition.

Here is “The Kantha Revolution”. I got all three pieces matted today. You can barely see the matte as it is only 1/4″ bigger than the pieces.

I think they look good as a triptych so I will probably donate all three pieces for the auction.

The background was done a long time ago when we played with soy was with my local surface design group.

I have gradually added the Kantha stitching over the last couple of years. This is the only one that has satin stitch added as well. Which one is your favorite?

I also added a sketch of a seed head to one of my previously painted pages in my sketch book. The photo that I used to sketch from showed the seed head in green, but I liked it in brown on this background. Thanks for stopping by and if you’re in the US, I hope you have a good Labor Day weekend.

Color Homework Finished

Posted on August 23, 2013 by ruthlane under hand stitching, journals, Kantha

I worked most of the day competing my homework for Level 1 Color Studies. And it is finally finished.

All of the pages just barely fit back together. The first comment from Dennis was “This book is heavy.”

I was going to use this as the cover but decided to use the original one instead. I put this one in front of the section on color wheels.

This is the page on painting neutrals to match a photo. This was really difficult to do and get colors that are similar.

This section is about finding paint chips to match an object. I had a hard time with this exercise as well because nothing really seemed to match.

The other problem with this exercise is that when I printed the photo of the object, the color wasn’t even close. I fiddled with the first photo to get it to match the real color. I left the purple vase photo as it printed out so it looks nothing like the paint chips.

I enjoyed this exercise. I mixed and painted a variety of colors that I thought worked. Then I put them into a color scheme. I also found some fabric and threads that worked.

Then I made two more color schemes. One with more blue violet and one with more green. I like the one on the right best.

After I finished the color notebook, I cut up a large Kantha piece into three squares. I am going to lace these and then they will be in an auction to raise money for a new exhibit space at the Gail Harker Center for Creative Arts.

Another Color Notebook

Posted on August 10, 2013 by ruthlane under class, journals

I worked all day Friday on finishing my homework for my color class. The second notebook is a larger size and includes all the color wheels, scales and other color exercises.

I got about half of the pages completed. Right now, I have all the pages separated from the notebook until I have all the page placement figured out.

Here you can see the stack of pages that I finished. I have at least that many more to go.

This is one of my colors wheels done with three primary colors of paint.

This photo is very dark but shows a red to blue scale.

This is one of my six primary color wheels. I had never painted one of these before.

I did a bunch of color studies using different colors from magazines and catalogs.

This is a combination of paint, photos printed from the computer and magazine photos.

And here’s one in green.

Then I did all of my paint colors in tints and shades scales. I really enjoyed seeing the different combinations that occur. I am happy that I’m almost finished with the homework because I have yurt duties. Today we started felting the yurt walls. I will be posting about the process on Thursday on the Felting and Fiber Studio site.

Continued Painting Plus a Gift

Posted on August 2, 2013 by ruthlane under fibers

I am still working on my homework from my Color class with Gail Harker. I finished the small notebook of color schemes and painted more scales.

This is the small color notebook which is 6″x 6″.

The color schemes are based on a book by Johannes Itten.

There are dyads, triads, tetrads and hexads and I have painted pages for all the different possibilities. Some I painted twice because the first effort wasn’t good.

I really enjoyed painting these as it is always interesting to see how the pages turn out. Once you get up to 4 and 6 colors it is difficult getting all the colors on such a small page without it turning to mud.

Here are the various scales that I painted today drying. Most of these are tints to shades (adding white and black). I still need to do more of the mixing complementary color scales. I have most of the homework completed but I still have to organize the other notebook. It was a great class and she does offer it online if you can’t make it to La Conner, Washington. When I finished painting, my husband brought me a “gift”.