Artist for September, J.M.W Turner.

Artist for August, Gustav Klimt.

Artist for July, James Gleeson.

Artist for June, Leonard French.

After a very long break from this blog I thought that it would be a good idea to put up the rest of my pieces in the Artist a Month series.

With seven people in the group, there were 7 artists chosen for the year, so here are my remaining four interpretations of the artists chosen.

Featured Artist for April, Edgar Degas.

Sunset from a Plane Window.

Workshop in Progress.

Having worked quite a bit with Lutradur over the past few years, I was asked to run a workshop at our local Embroiderers Guild as an introduction to the medium for interested members.

The past month has been very busy with lots of other things, but I also managed to make lots of samples for the workshop and also to write up a couple of pages of notes for the participants. There were just over 20 people in the group and they all seemed to have a lot of fun.

I'm not sure if anyone will go on to use Lutradur in their work though, it will be interesting to see at the next Guild exhibition later in the year. It's to be called Colours of the Gallaxy.

Digitized Version of The Coffee Set.

The Coffee Set after Applying a Filter in Photoshop.

The Coffee Set by Criss Canning.

The artist chosen by the Stitched Together group this month is Criss Canning, one of Australia's leading still life artists. Her paintings of flowers in beautiful vases are easily recognisable, but I have chosen to work from her painting of a black, white and yellow coffee set. Not content with choosing an atypical work by Canning, I have also applied a filter in Photoshop to reach my final design. I digitzed the main elements of the design with my Bernina software and finished it off with the old Pfaff workhorse.

Happy Birthday Rohan!

I belong to a group called Stitched Together, who all met at College when studying Art and design in the late 1990s. Since finishing our course we have been meeting almost every month and every second year we mount an exhibition, we have had 3. In the alternate year we set some sort of challege to work on instead. This year we have each chosen an artist, and each person in the group is to make an A5 piece reflecting the work of the artist chosen for that month. The artist chosen for this month is Australian book illustrator Graeme Base. This is my piece from his book The Discovery of Dragons.

My little Grandson Rohan turns one on Saturday and I have been busy making him a special Birthday book. It has photos of all the family in it, each one transferred to textile and appliqued onto commercial printed fabric with pictures relevant to the family member on it. It has been a lot of fun to make, especially choosing just the right fabric for each aunt, uncle, cousin, grandparent and parent, not to mention the dog!

Today was the hottest day ever recorded in Melbourne. It reached 46.4C and outside in the garden it felt like a blast furnace with the howling northerly winds and searing heat. There are fires burning out of control around the state and the loss of property, bushland and wildlife is horrific. Fortunately there have been no loss of life..........yet!

We are fortunate in the city suburbs that all we have to complain about is the loss of our gardens and the personal discomfort of such extraordinary weather.

Garden Series 1.

Well, it's finished, the first of the garden series. It's very much a copy of the photo as you can see, but I got the distinct impression that the woman commissioning the embroideries was not an abstract kind of person.

Light and Shade.

Here in Melbourne we have a wonderful outlet called Reverse Art Truck. Local businesses donate their waste, such as cardboard, plastic, rubber, wood etc and individuals or groups can fill a bag of 'rubbish' for a set price. I have just been and filled a bag of foam offcuts for stamping, cardboard pieces for bookmaking, wooden rods for stiring dyes pots, wooden blocks for mounting stamps, heavy plastic sheets for monoprinting and many more goodies. Here is a sample of my haul.

This Looks Useful.

A Good Days Dyeing.

A Missing Increment.

Focus in a Garden Corner.

No More Sitting on This One!

Water Tanks for the Vegetable Garden.

Vegetable Garden Renovation

Sepia filter in Paint Shop Pro

Looking at the pencil sketch below got me thinking about possibly using part of the sketch in a piece of work, but making it into a sepia version with just a few accents of vegetation in coloured thread. Here in Melbourne a house that is 100 years old is considered to be quite old, and the sepia colour would emphasise this idea. I seem to recall that Paintshop Pro has a sepia filter.

Computer Pencil Sketch of the House.

One of the Large Pots.

A corner of the Tennis Court.

The Next Challenge.

My next challenge is to design and make 2 or 3 pieces capturing the essence of a garden that celebrates its centenary later this year. The house, designed by an eminent Australian architect, sits on a 2 acre block of land facing a small in ground swimming pool. The garden is mainly huge old trees with paths winding through the shrubs. There are very few flowers, the focal points are large urns and pots dotted around the garden, mostly empty. There is a beautiful grass tennis court and a very ornate cast iron bench facing it. Twelve artists have been invited to depict some aspect of the garden, the resulting art works will be featured in an exhibition in August, with the owner of the house having first choice of the pieces shown. I get the impression that the owner would prefer, and would be more likely to buy, works that are realistic rather than abstract. It's not a garden that shows immediate potential with its lack of colourful flowers. A challenge.

Pear prints using Gocco print-making screens. It might be worth making silk screens for these images, or perhaps printing the images onto prepared fabric with the computer, as the prints with the Gocco machine do not show the fine detail of the originals.

Computer Play with Pears.

Next I tried printing with half a cut pear.

I have recently been asked by a friend in his 80s to make a piece of art reflecting his surname Birnbauer. He has only one child, a son, who has 3 daughters, hense the family name will die with the death of this son. Birnbauer translates as Pear Farmer, so I have been collecting pictures of pears and taking photos of pears. Here are a couple of my efforts.