images, reuse and revisit
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010Last April, I took a photo in Hong Kong that ultimately became “Market Day, Hong Kong”:
I loved the photo, and felt that the resulting art quilt was ok, I liked the bag she is holding, was very proud of the way I fussy cut the umbrella fabric, and I used a silk for her shirt that my parents brought back from Hong Kong twenty years ago. Nice touch, but I really felt that the strength and interest in this photo was the woman’s face, which was so small in the overall piece that I felt it lacked the impact it deserved.
So there is nothing that says we cannot revisit a starting photo, and in keeping with my new series of closeup faces, done small but (hopefully) with big impact, I reused this face and did it again.
This still is no where near finished, just at the glue stage. But I think this now captures what was missing in the larger piece. Of course, I could redo the entire figure, larger, using this face which has more impact, but in moving forward I feel that I don’t want to do big pieces, and I don’t want to do the bodies, the backgrounds–that for now, anyway, I just want to work on the faces themselves. Finding your voice has as much to do with what you want to do as with what you don’t want to do, remember?
Where I have also made an adjustment from the other two I did since I started this series (go back in the blog entries a week or so to see them) is the color. Here, I decided to mix both warm and cool colors, letting the base fabric of the face remain warm and fleshy, and using the cools as the darker values. I prefer this approach to the last face I worked on in this series (and may make adjustments to it before I finish it) where the face done in the red tones is just too warm. It needs to be cooled down, which I tried with the blue at the bottom corner, but the overall effect is still too hot. So I like this approach, mixing color temperatures for more of a balance.
What was it the three bears said “not too hot, not too cool, it was just right”. Damn, those bears knew their color theory!
