Saturday, January 28, 2012

New Paper Work

The last couple of days have been hot and sticky here in the Tassie Highlands.  Perfect weather to avoid going outdoors and complete a new work on paper.


This work is (loosely) based on the form of a type of unicellular life form (a diatom, which is a type of phytoplankton.  There are over 100,000 different living species so please don't ask me which one this is!).

The detail seen in microscopic images of the diatom are way to detailed to faithfully reproduce in embroidery on paper, so what you have here is my own interpretation, which is, of course the whole point of the artistic process.

You can see the subtle variegations in the thicker orange, blue and red threads.  By creating threads with several different, subtle shades of the one colour, the resulting image becomes much more visually exciting.


I like this one a lot.  I think I'm finally working out the technical and visual complexities of working a detailed image on a densely detailed background. 

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2 comments:

Kim in ND said...

I, too, fell in love with the shapes of diatoms. Here's a piece I made featuring 2 of them:
http://periodictableinfabric.com/2011/03/08/silicon/
click on photo to enlarge

Marta Brysha said...

Love your diatom. So much more detailed than I could achieve on paper. You would love a book called Ernst Haeckel's Artforms in Nature. All of the images on my paper works were inspired by images from this book.

http://www.amazon.com/Forms-Nature-Dover-Pictorial-Archive/dp/0486229874