Helen Parrott is a textile artist whose work I've admired for a long time and when I learnt that she was giving a workshop following on from her talk to London Quilters in September I was the first to sign up!
The workshop on mark making and hand stitching started out with exercises in collage, then critiques of everyone's compositions.
The next exercise was to draw 'blind' - that is, to draw with candle wax or white crayon, making bold and gestural marks roughly on a theme you've picked, or not. The drawing was then painted over with a solution of Brusho and water, resulting in deep colours which revealed the image. I found this liberating as I think the images are rather looser than they might have been if I could have seen the marks as they were being made. They look rather crude but may well be inspiration for a new body of work I am planning to make
The workshop on mark making and hand stitching started out with exercises in collage, then critiques of everyone's compositions.
The next exercise was to draw 'blind' - that is, to draw with candle wax or white crayon, making bold and gestural marks roughly on a theme you've picked, or not. The drawing was then painted over with a solution of Brusho and water, resulting in deep colours which revealed the image. I found this liberating as I think the images are rather looser than they might have been if I could have seen the marks as they were being made. They look rather crude but may well be inspiration for a new body of work I am planning to make
We then explored running stitch and its variety and texture depending on the type of thread, the fabric and the length of the stitch. These are my samples, highly textured and evocative of landscapes
