I have continued to make slow progress on my forest floor piece. Since I showed you last, I have stitched down the rocks and added some shadows.
I decided on the final rock placement and then stitched them in place. I moved the rock that is now on the top right over from the left since it was much lighter. This reinforces the feeling of the light shining from behind the trees. Once the rocks were stitched in place, I decided they needed a bit more definition as they kind of looked like potatoes to me.
I remembered a book about nature journaling that I had checked out from the library by John Muir Laws. I decided to look him up online to see if he had some information about drawing rocks. I found a wealth of information on his site about drawing in nature. If you would like to improve your drawing skills, this is an excellent resource.
I took the photo from above and printed it out. Then I used a piece of tracing paper to sketch the rock placement. Then I used hatching techniques to give some shape to the rocks. These aren’t specific rocks. I find it much easier to draw/sketch when I have a photo of what I am trying to draw or I can look at a specific rock or landscape. But they look more like rocks than potatoes now.
I decided to use the same blue that is already in the nuno background for the shadows. That would tie all the blue bits in as shadows and move the blue over on to the right side of the composition too. I used a straight stitch to do the “hatching” on the rocks using #12 Sulky cotton thread. Once those shadows were in, I knew I needed to add cast shadows from the rock on to the ground. So I brought out my navy blue sheer fabric to create some cast shadows.
Here’s the piece after adding the sheer fabric around the rocks. I stitched the sheer fabric down with #40 machine thread with tiny stitches. Now guess what? I need more shadows in front of the trees. It’s always funny to me that I am working along and when some shadows are added, I can immediately see that I need more. So the next step is more sheer blue fabric to add the cast shadows from the trees. Then I will begin adding more leaves and the white flowers so that it will resemble my original collage below.
