This September’s Live Online Fabric Collage class was unique among the many I have taught so far. A portion of the students were first-time-online class attendees for five days of fabric collage—such as Dale Goldberg who began the portrait above, of her Daisy. The rest of the students were veterans to my classes, who signed up for individual days of independent study. We had eight of these students who were working on “Loose Ends,” collage projects they had begun in other online classes of mine. Each of these students had signed up for two days of class-time feed-back, either Monday and Wednesday, or Tuesday and Thursday.
This structure made for an interesting experience for both me and the students themselves. The “full-week” students saw a wide variety of independent study projects and could learn from the returning students. The “Loose Ends” folks had work time between their chosen class days to get further along on their collage subjects. For me, I was able to take more time with each student since class size on only two of the days was eight, other days was less. I even had time to take lunch breaks.
Having students in and out of class all week made for a challenging class photo. But through Tom’s skill of “dropping” someone’s photo into an overall shot, we collected all (but one) smiling face, below.
I’ll now introduce you to the Zoophies—the week-long students in the Zoom zoological breakout room—Ardis Bucy, Billie Whitlow, and Dale Goldberg. In next week’s post, we’ll re-introduce the returning students of the Loose Ends.
Ardis Bucy
Goal for the week: “How to know where to put the details.”
Ardis Bucy of California, had a goal for the week that was a bit of a stretch, but we worked in the details of her cheetah portrait where we could. Usually, details are more of a second draft, after the base fabrics of the first draft are down. But take a look at the photos below—Ardis is filling in the central nose area, out to the edges of her cheetah’s muzzle. At that point, she can now slip the dark of “Geraldine’s” facial lines under the muzzle—a detail of collage construction I talk about in this “sequence” post. She’ll be applying the same idea of sequence construction for most of the spots in the fur.
In the photos below, you can easily see the difference from first draft nose to second draft. Adding rose petals as detail highlights is purrfect for Geraldine.
From Ardis:
An art quilt group that I belong to has a challenge titled African Beauty. Susan was having the class on animals. Therefore I wanted to find an African animal! There were too many to choose from. [this photo was found on an online copyright-free site]
Billie Whitlow
Goal for the week: “To get more comfortable working with value—I tend toward medium and dark fabrics.”
Billie Whitlow of New Mexico, had some good experience with that most difficult of steps—getting started—twice. She wanted to learn how to work with the lights and darks of value—and with the sea turtle above, she had a very nice beginning (click on photos to see them larger). On the left, Billie cut a good looking fabric palette from a few batik prints, and on the right she did a great job placing and trimming them so they blended well together. But by the end of Day Two, Billie was slowing down. Eventually this will be a lovely, but subtle, turtle—nothing wrong with that, but I sensed that Billie needed a bit more excitement. So she set the turtle aside and began… a fish.
When I was at the beginning of my fabric collage journey, I created hundreds of small fish quilts and gained a ton of experience in the process. When Billie made her switch this week, she added to her original fabric selection, photos below, and let the patterns in the fabrics start to inspire her with fins, eyelashes, and fantastic fish lips. She’s now well on her own “cutting loose” fabric collage journey.
Dale Goldberg
Goal for the week: “Blending and color on a black dog.”
Dale Goldberg of Pennsylvania, has a black Daisy dog just like Tom and I used to have, though ours was about 50 pounds heavier. Still, I have a soft spot in my heart for Dale’s cute little girl. One of Dale’s goals for the week was to get color into Daisy’s fur, and the coral and mossy greens are already starting to work nicely as highlights on her muzzle. One of the first things I look at when someone is working on an animal portrait is the nose. “Start with the nose,” I say—almost everything spreads out across the face from there. Daisy’s nose is not only drawn very well, but wonderfully fun with those big ol’ spirals and foliage designs from Dale’s fabrics, adding highlights and details.
Dale progressed right through Daisy’s facial features. After the nose came her eyes. If you look close, you can pick out the small leaves that Dale fussy-cut from her fabric and spiraled them around the pupils to create nicely variegated irises. Farther below, are Daisy’s tongue sequence photos. Dale found perfect fabric for a perfectly cute pup tongue. It’s like Daisy is emerging from the foundation fabric!
From Dale:
I have taken a number of online classes with various teachers, and Susan’s class is hands down the best I’ve ever taken. She is generous with her time, and very patient with helping each person understand what they need to be doing to improve. She has great attention to detail, and I never got the sense that she was hurrying to finish focusing on someone’s work, but spent the time needed to help the person understand why something may not be working in their project, or how to make it even better.
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