Recently, my son asked me to make make some paintings for a report he had at school. He needed two images to include. One was a portrait of Duke Ellington and the second was of a piano. I love a good painting challenge, especially portraits which I rarely attempt but as soon as I saw this face I knew I had to paint it.
Here it is. As you can see portraits remain a challenge but he has such a fantastically interesting face doesn’t he?
Here is the piano:
After completing the paintings, I scanned them into my computer and said my goodbyes. I decided I wanted to play around with the images a little so I printed them out onto a piece of cotton fabric from my home printer. (If you would like a more detailed description of how to print on fabric from your home computer, click HERE to see my blog post about that.)
I really had no idea how this would evolve since I just decided to forgo planning and be spontaneous.
I backed the fabric with lightweight interfacing then placed the image in a wooden embroidery hoop.
If you are curious what lightweight interfacing is, it is a stabilizer that can be ironed on the the back of your fabric. It makes the fabric a little sturdier to better hold your stitching and also helps the fabric from being so see-through so you can’t see the stitching from the front. Pictured below is what I use.
You simply place the bumpy side of the interfacing to face the “wrong side” of the fabric (the back) and then press with an iron until they bond together. The textured side is the glue that fuses to the fabric when melted with the iron.
Unfortunately/fortunately I got so into this that I did not take any progress shots but I started with the coral flower in the upper left corner (The WOVEN WHEEL STITCH.) Using a mechanical pencil I started making sketches and then embroidering over the pencil. I added the lines behind his head to represent bars of musical notes and then decided there should definitely be some piano keys so I sketched and embroidered those. I found that image of the note playing the trumpet online and sketched that because I thought it was adorable! The rest all came from me. I filled in the space with some grayish blue vine-like lines, some random musical notes and a banner with a quote at the bottom. I just kept adding little sketches, then embroidering over them until the piece was ‘done’ or as per usual in my case, overdone! It reminded me of a doodle sketch you might do in your notebook in class or if you have a piece of paper in front of you when you are on the phone, thus the concept EMBROIDERING DOODLE SKETCHES.
For the piano, I tried to capture more process shots.
Here is the piano image printed on cotton muslin.
Here is a top view. I noticed that there is a gaping hole between the hands and the piano.
The perfect spot for the a quote from the piano man himself! A nod to following your passion, “You can get what you want or you can just get old.”
I added some little coral hearts and dots to the piano to make this a matching set.
I haven’t decided what to do with them yet as far as framing. I may pin them in matching shadow boxes or I might paint the wooden hoops with a nice bright acrylic paint.
Hope this has inspired you to give doodle sketching a try! You don’t even have to have any sketching skill if you just stick to lines, dots, straight stitches and LAZY DAISY stitches. SO MUCH FUN.
Thank you for stopping by!
Pam