PFA january 2021

Challenge January 2021, Watercolor with acrylics

I live in the Netherlands where I work as a French translator, so Dutch and French are quite easy for me. This challenge is not only a challenge to make a postcard every month, but it is also a challenge to write everything in Englisch.

 

I watched the tutorials of Susan Brabaker Knapp and Anne Stoeckel Peck. I'm always very fond of floral images and nature landscapes, so I decided to make a flower. 

I chose a flower from a website with pictures from my neighbourhood. 

This picture is made by Kitty de Zeeuw and it is a 'harig wilgenroosje' aka epilobium hirsutum

I printed it to have the image near my work. 

I started to paint a simple coton fabric with different green colours acrylic paint.

And I used the rest of the paint on another piece of fabric.

I ironed it between baking paper. The paint will dry faster, I  imagine. Now I could see better how it looked and I added some swipes of paint.

I used my lightpad to trace the contour of the flower on a piece of paper and then traced it with a pencil on a piece of net curtain. 

I pinned the net curtain on the second piece of fabric and started to paint.

  

When finished painting I took off the net curtain to let it dry on a clean piece of paper. The impression that stayed on the fabric was good enough to finish this flower.

 

I added some white spots in the grass. This one is finished for now. 

When the paint on the net curtain flower was dry, it was easy to cut it. It doesn't unravel anymore.

 

I made an orage heart in the middle of the flower by free motion sewing.

I added some stamen.

With the back of a knife I curled slightly the petals.

Usually I trim my cards by using a quilt ruler of 15 x 15 cm. But the stamen were to high and made the ruler wobble. So I used my metal ruler. 

 

I have loads of furniture fabric out of a sample book that I use for backing. 

I made 2 zigzags around the postcard.

And here is my fabric postcard!

Later I discovered I should have used some sort of liquid to make a layer on the tissu, to enable you to paint with watercolours. I had some textile medium in my closet from 15 or 20 years ago and I made some experiments with unbleached coton and net curtain fabric.

 

I prepared the fabric with the textile medium and let it dry overnight. I found out that you have to be sure to rub it thoroughly. I painted with acrylics diluted with water. The fabric is very stiff.

I prepared the fabric with the textile medium and painted it directly with the acrylics. As the paint flowed into each other, you hardly could see the differences in the green colours. That's why I free motion quilted the base. The fabric is also very stiff. 

I mixed the acrylics and the medium directly and painted the fabric. I like this one, the fabric stays smooth.

Without textile medium. I used only acrylics diluted with water. I painted the edge of the flower with normal acrylics, so it doesn't unravel when I cut it. The fabric stays smooth.

Made with the left overs of the paint.

First I embroidered the flower with my sewing machine. Then I painted the flower with the acrylics mixed with the textile medium. It flowed a little through the seams. Then I coated the background with the textile medium, let it dry and painted it with green diluted with water. Mwaah.

You can see that a lockdown and a lot of spare time can be positif. In normal times I would never have down this kind of experiments.