Fabric Project

The idea behind this work was to capture a portrait using fabric. I Haven't used fabric very much, if at all in art classes. I Have used fabric in the past to make useful things such as pillow cases or I made a stuffed animal, so I am familiar with working with the material, but usually the things I make are more for practicality and less for the visual aspect. I chose to do a portrait because I thought that playing with sewing lines and facial feature could be cool. I also wanted to challenge myself with not trying to make it look realistic and embracing the almost doll like look that would result from using different colors and textures of fabric to put together a face.

For this project we were supposed to use fabric. We were given all sorts of colors and patterns and textures, and I thought this was a super cool way to really incorporate color and texture into a work. often pattern also is something that isn't super obvious in other forms of work that are more realistic, so this was a way to really work with that. This was a material I have worked with before but not so much in the artistic sense. I enjoyed sewing and seeing how the lines of the sewing machine could enhance my design.

I started by just looking online at some fabric portraits and I saw so many that used darker fabrics and lines of sewing to separate shadows and highlights and was really intrigued by that. I was also interested by how unrealistic and doll like they were and I wanted to try out those big red circles for cheeks and not having to worry about the shading in between the eyebrows and eyes I could just stick fabric together and see how it looked. I started just picking out fabrics I thought looked cool, and then cut and lay them out into something resembling a face. I was going to pick out a pallette first, but ended up just picking things as I went along, and sort of forced certain fabrics in if I really liked them. Then I just sewed following the lines of the fabric and ended up with a portrait that is super unrealistic and does look almost like a doll which I really like.