lazertran continued

Well, I got up my nerve and started working with the 'good' image transfers. I put them on a nice, heavy silk. They came out a little less bright, but that was okay. I picked out three that seemed to go together--closeups of hedge apples that I had played with in Photoshop Elements. I put fusing on the back, decided they would make a nice set of pieces, and started to think about backgrounds. Microwave silk dyeing came to the rescue, I used dark brown and then an acid green to produce a mottled background.

Recently I found some square gallery wrapped artist canvases at WalMart on clearance. At this point, I had pretty much decided to go for a triptych, with each third mounted on a canvas whose edges I had painted to coordinate.

So I cut a piece of the background to size, and started playing. I quickly realized that I wanted to cut into the transfers, a scary moment. But I can always make more. I cut out the hedge apple, then cut some freehand shapes from the remaining part of the picture. Here is the result of the first one:


In some ways I liked it better without the quilting, but it needed the structure to hang correctly. The edges are heat singed to prevent raveling.

The next one continues the theme, but changes it some:




I'm working with the notion of earth being the only planet we've got, that all life that we know about springs from it, and that the hedge apple is a metaphor for that whole idea. So here, the stringy things are either going into the sphere or coming out, depending on my frame of mind.

The third part of the triptych continues the theme, with another variation:



The sphere is farther away, and there is more negative space.

Now the payoff, the three of them together:



I like the way this piece is coming together. The strings become more organized as you look up, the apple is bigger. Now all I have to do is paint the canvases and mount the pieces to them. And post them to my website. And maybe enter them in some shows...

So lazertran does have its uses. I still probably won't buy more right now, because of the difficulty of borrowing a laser printer...but they do have an inkjet version now...