Thursday, December 3, 2009

Purple Phalaenopsis in progress

by Susan Brubaker Knapp



Today, I finished painting my next orchid piece for the Fiber Art Options exhibition. It is a purple phalaenopsis orchid painted with acrylic paints on Pimatex PFD (prepared for dyeing) cotton, which has a very tight weave and accepts paint well.

This piece will be about 24 x36" when it is finished. I am very pleased with how the painting turned out, and I can’t wait to start stitching on it!

I started with this photo that I took a year or so ago:


The photo I printed out, from which I worked as I painted, had a good deal more pink and red tones in it, which showed up in my painted version. I think I’m going to use a lot of bright purple thread to unify it a bit. The painted surface has so much detail that I’m not going to do my normal thread sketching on this piece. I’m just going to machine quilt it pretty heavily.

I’m so excited that I fear I will have to force myself to go to bed tonight, and not stay up until the wee hours working on it.

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