Obama II

It was interesting working on this project this week in particular, because I worked on it longer than I ever had. I found that the process is very relaxing. The times seems to fly by quickly when I am working, because it is something that I enjoy doing. My classes these past few weeks have been pretty stressful, so to stop and do something relaxing, served as a great stress reliever.

I almost finished my portrait of Barack Obama this week. Some of the parts that I worked on were the filling in of the hair, the outline of the head, and the rest of the face using different colored threads to almost shade the different features on the face.


I didn't run across too many problems this week, but I did have a minor issue of one of my threads getting looped around the clamp to the hoop that I use to keep the main fabric tight when I am working. Luckily, I was home this weekend, and my mother was able to give me tips on how to fix the problem and how to keep it from happening again. Her advice proved to be helpful, and I haven't run into any more problems.

Next week I hope to have this portrait finished. This goal seems pretty reasonable. I still have to embroider the Obama campaign logo and his name, which I don't think will take more time than what I can do this week.

Obama

I began to embroider a portrait of President Obama. I want to do portraits of well known people. He is known around the world, and I also like him. The first step was to look up pictures on the internet. I then drew a rough sketch by hand on a piece of paper.


Next, I took a piece of fabric that I am using to embroider on and traced my drawing onto the fabric. Then, I began to embroider the hair with black thread and using various stitches. For the outline of Obama's head, I used a dashed line, and I used x's to fill in the area, because I think that this design creates the illusion of texture.


I'm pleased with the work that I have done so far. The sketch took the most time, because I didn't trace the internet picture onto the paper. Instead, I used the internet picture to look off of to draw a free-handed copy. I plan on filling in more hair, and I would like to have most of this portrait done by next week.

Getting Started

I have decided that I am going to learn how to embroider for this project. I was inspired to choose this particular skill while reading the section in Handmade Nation about Jenny Hart. Some of the work that she did was so beautiful, and it made me want to see if I had the talent to create something as detailed and beautiful with a medium that I had never used before.

Also, I want to try embroidering portraits of celebrities or other figures in pop culture. It will make for a slight contradiction of sorts because what people tend to embroider is subtle in nature, and I am going to embroider is the opposite of subtle and more along the lines of what is known as kitsch. This refers to art that almost blurs the line of what is and is not art, because the subject matter that is portrayed in the work is usually not considered worthy of being depicted. However, in kitsch, the subject matter is presented in a way that makes it seem artful.

My mother has embroidered in the past, and she has given me a few tips about technique, but I will also experiment with the medium and see what works best for me. She helped me pick out the materials that I will be using, and I am sure that my mother will be very helpful when I have questions during this project.