Jennifer Solon: Mixed Media And Textile Artist

Searching for inspiration, I have come across Jennifer Solon who I believe is a very talented mixed media artist. Originally working with fabrics Jennifer has transformed her work to that of mixed media incorporating paints, pigments and waxes into layers.
Her work involves the use of hand dyed textiles, digital imagery, papers and paint. She has been described as an improvisational artist who works on her own intuition and thrives on play and experimentation.
Jennifer's uses the relationship between colour, shape and texture in her art.

Handpainted Barcodes

I have recently been playing around with a few ideas for the final project for Textile Art and have sketched examples in my sketchbook. The latest idea for Marks in the Landscape involve the bar code as I'm using the economy and social attitude and mood of the country and landscape for my final piece.
I have painted these barcodes using heat sensitive fabric paint which I bought from HobbyCraft. Firstly I attempted to create a semi decayed/rusty/mouldy background and then painted the bar code over the top. These pieces will now need to be ironed so as to bond together the paint with the fabric.

Textile Art: Ideas For The Final Piece

Just the phrase 'final piece' is now starting to cause a slight shiver down my spine. However fun textile Art sessions have been, it is now getting serious and I'm still not 100% sure how I am going to do what I think I'm going to attempt. Never the less in the class I decided to use some of the batik pieces I made during an earlier Textile session. Firstly I chose a couple of photo's of close up walls revealing a pattern of some kind. I then machine stitched over the fabric using the darning foot so as to resemble the pattern in some way.
I realise that I may need to create several small pieces so I can choose the best ones to add to one larger collage or mixed-media piece of art.

Textile Art 3D Session

For our last Textile Art session we were shown a number of pictures of unusually shaped buildings and told to replicate one of them into a 3D piece of art. 
This proved particularly difficult as the project we were working on involved sphere like objects and our first attempt to create a 3D sphere by intertwining wire and covering with fabric failed.
However after realising that we would need to create several circles first and then stitch them together things started to progress.
Here's how we did it: Firstly we bent wire into a circle and then both machine stitched and hand stitched fabric around the wire. After this and to save time we used paper and stuck the paper around the wire. When we had at least twelve circles we started to stitch the circles together forming one larger sphere.

Textile Art Homework: 3D

For our Textile Art homework we were given some rather rough and stringy pieces of fabric to go home with and told to try to manipulate those pieces into something resembling 3D.
After some contemplation as to what to do I decided I would try to make a cube. This proved quite tricky as the fabric kept straying and falling apart the more I played about with it but in the end I did manage to form some sort of a cube looking object. Firstly I cut the fabric into two and then dabbed some gloss medium adhesive onto the pieces to make them a little firmer. When dry I roughly hand stitched the pieces together forming a cube.

                                         

 

Photo To Fabric Transferring

Just a small blog on the success of photo to fabric transferring that I've recently discovered. Actually the process is quite simple although there are various ways of doing it. The articles I read suggested buying a gel medium however I spent too long searching for this stuff in HobbyCraft and in the end decided to buy Gloss Medium by Winsor and Newton. Gloss Medium is used for acrylics to increase depth of colour. It also has a binder and adhesive properties. I hoped that this would work seeing as it cost £7.99. Luckily I was very happy with the results which are shown in the photograph below.
So how did I do it? Firstly I printed out my chosen picture after flipping the pic back to front. I then covered the pic in the gloss medium and pressed it onto a piece of fabric. I then took a heavy book. The one I chose happened to have a plastic cover and this is where I made a mistake which worked out very well. As according to the instructions I read it is advised to leave the fabric and gel medium covered pic overnight until they are firmly glued together and without leaving anything (like my book) on top of them. After drying scrape away the paper (which is tedious) revealing the image on the cloth. However my impatience got the better of me and after about an hour and half I lifted the book to see how my experiment was doing but the paper got stuck to the laminated book and came away from the fabric. The image though was fine. Note: give the book cover a good clean before the medium has a chance to dry.