It was hot here in Adelaide today, so I chose to focus on a plant that just doesn't seem to die...in short...it survives the heat! It is a silver leaved succulent which has beautiful salmony coloured bell shaped flowers which look like this...
...and buds that look like this...
...and they sit atop stems which tower above fleshy rounded leaves which look like...
...this! I call it 'that-silvery-succulenty-thing', whereas you will undoubtedly be much better versed in plant names & know what it is REALLY named!
Producing a weekly project & making it's construction public in the form of both blog & facebook page, means that I am very conscious of trying to keep it all interesting, I truly do not want to bore you! So today, I decided to be adventurous, whilst still keeping to my contemporary reverse applique technique. Here's what I got up to...
I began quite simply with filling a page with black pen sketches of buds, flowers & leaf shapes. The page itself looked so interesting that I decided to photocopy it on to fabric to use at a later stage.
More sketching with the addition of colour this time, which gave me confidence in the lines I was going to reproduce to make a pattern for this piece, & helped me recognise what my colour range needed to be.
A rummage amidst my stash produced these fabric choices, and so the process began.
Using the black & white print of my sketches as the background fabric, I began cutting back the layers to reveal my flower.
After multiple cutbacks it looked like this. I could have left it there, but I didn't. Of course!
Instead of using thread to add a bit of depth & interest, this time I decided to play around with paint.
This is what it looked like after the first lot of paint was added. However, it wasn't finished yet! When the paint was dry, I decided to...
...paint over some of it in white. The flowers look opaque, as if a fine white mist has been sprayed over them, so I hoped that this layer of paint would mute some of the components a little & blend the other colours I'd painted in before.
This is the end result & I am very pleased with it. This was completed today with the assistance of iced black coffee, glasses of water & a very reliable electric fan. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do....even if the world is frying up around her!
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