Felting

Felting is a rather bizarre form of art, in my opinion, but I do enjoy it. I used two types of felting techniques for this unit: wet felting and needle felting. Felt is the oldest known fabric making known to man, but you can read more about that in my previous post.

 With felting, every art piece is a surprise, because you really only have a small amount of control of what it is going to turn out like. It is an unpredictable form of art that is different every time. I am very happy with the way that my picture below turned out, and I had a lot of fun making it.

 

I started with the background of my art piece, in which I used wet felting, and I will list the steps that I did below.

1. First I took a sheet of bubble wrap and spread it out with the bubbles facing up. I then took the colours of wool roving that I needed (when I say "wool roving" I mean balls of colourful fluff meant for this type of art) and pulled out little thin bits of fluff and laid them out on the bubble rap. More than one layer is needed, and you must change the direction of the felt with each layer ( one layer horizontal, one layer vertical, etc.).
2. Then you must sprinkle soapy water on the felt and fold the bubble rap over it. It works best if you also wet the top of the bubble rap with water, and maybe some soap to make it slippery enough.
3. In order to create the friction that will fuse the wool fluff together, you must rub the wool through the bubble wrap in all different directions (horizontal, vertical, diagonal, etc. etc.) Continue this for a while until the wool has fused together.                                                               ( Feel free to add more layers or colours after or before the wool has fused together.)

4.     When the felt is to your liking, scrunch it into a ball and rinse it out, so that there is no soap left in it. Then dry it as best you can by folding it in a tea towel, put it on the floor, and step on it ( My aunt says that this is the best way to get the water out of it) Don't feel confined to just stepping on it though, jump on it, do a jig, or whatever :) .
5.     And voila! You have a lovely felted piece of art! But my project didn't stop there...

Needle Felting

For the tree and the owl on my art piece, I used a technique called needle felting. I took fluffs of wool rovings and used a felting needle to "poke" it into the place and shape that I wanted it in. The felting needle is just like a large sewing needle, but if you look closely you can see tiny hook-like notches near the end of it, which are used to sort of catch the wool and pull it down through the felt/fabric so that it will stay in place. To do this I had to place the art piece on a piece of foam  ( the inside of a pillow or something will work too). When you are done, the art piece will stick to the foam, so you have to pull it off. And there you go, the lovely piece of felt art is complete!

 

 

All the information that I used for this post came from my Aunty Colleen, and my wonderful cousins Mika and Estee, who introduced this type of art to me.

 

Coming soon...

The next art form that I am going to explore is felting: wet felting and needle felting. My Aunty Colleen, who is a wonderful artist, showed me felting when she came to visit this summer, and was lovely enough to leave me some supplies for it. So far I have only made a experiment picture, so I thought that it was high time for me to give it another go.

First, here is some history of felting. Long ago, shepherding nomadic peoples would put soft pieces of wool fluff into their shoes and under the saddles of their horses for warmth and comfort. Later, when they would take the wool out, they realized that it had turned into a sort of cloth. The friction and moisture caused the fibers of the wool fluff to fuse together, and the wool (or felt) could be used for many things, like clothes or tent coverings. It even could be used for art.

I will soon be posting more about this type of art, and hopefully be posting pictures of my own felting pieces.

Getting Started

Hey Everyone!
Well, here is my first official blog post. I decided to ease my way into this project, so I have started with an art form that I am already slighty familiar with: Pen and Ink. All you need to create a pen and ink drawing is thin tipped pens, not unlike fine tipped sharpies. For the first artpiece I did, I mainly used a common type of pen stroke called hatching, or cross hatching. Here is the picture below:


This is a pen and ink drawing on top of watercolour paint. It is based on a picture that I took of a broken window from an old shed on my farm. (Sorry about the bad quality picture, my camera is getting fixed so I had to use my mom's phone). This art piece didn't turn out exactly as I wanted it to. The red paint of the shed walls looks pinkish in contrast to the black pen, and if I did it again I would probably choose a softer green for the view out of the window in the background. But you learn from your mistakes, right? Anyways, this picture was made using hatching. Hatching is the most basic stroke that gives an illusion from a short distance that there are various shades of grey, when really it is all created from fine black lines. The fewer white spots that show, the darker the value appears. Cross hatching is simply hatching in which the lines cross over each other, to give a different look.

The picture above is a quick example of cross hatching. As you can see, the more lines there are, the darker it looks.

I also made another art piece using pen and ink, but this time with a different drawing method.

For this drawing of a leaf, I used a technique called stippling, of which there is an example of below.

Stippling uses tiny dots to create value and shades of grey with black pen. The closer together the dots are, the darker the tone. I was happy with the way the drawing of the leaf turned out, you just need a lot of patience with this technique. One can get tired of dots pretty fast! :)

 

Over all, I really enjoy doing pen and ink. It requires patience possibly a lot of time, depending on the technique you are using. The number 1 rule that I need to remember is DON'T GET LAZY! The lazier I get, the more sloppy I get, and sloppy, messy hatching or stippling does not turn out very well. Unless, of course you are doing a loose kind of pen and ink, which some people can do very well, but I cannot.
So that brings us to the end of this post. I hope you enjoyed reading it, and please feel free to give feedback, make comments, criticize, ask questions (though I probably will not be able to answer most of them :) ) etc. etc. And if you want some more information on pen and ink, I found some very good stuff at http://drawsketch.about.com/library/blinktexture.htm . Well, that's all for now! Till next time, Riley