Spontaneity...

...often leads to interesting work.  I've been playing about with painting fabric, after the success of the Dance piece, and when I'd run out of steam, there was still some paint left.  When in doubt...monoprint... so I grabbed some scraps of fabric.  I got several interesting pieces, one of which I worked up yesterday.

This is how it started.  It made me think of rocks, mountainsides, hillsides... so its name is 'Red Rock'.  So, I popped a bit of batting on the back, and hand stitched...and this is what it has ended up as.

I started at the bottom, stitching with variegated thread to give a reference to landscape (I hope), and then back stitched the red curve in the centre. I didn't want to add vast amounts of stitch, so took my queue from the dots of red that cover that area, and made some small, irregular stitches, just enough to suggest the colour.   Then, blanket stitch in the dominant brown curve, shortening the stitches as I went along to suggest distance.  And finally, I added washes of pale blue and pink watercolour paint, to tone down the white areas that were dominating the piece. 

And that's it.  I did contemplate more stitch in those paler sections, which almost make a V shape in the left hand side of the piece.  Finally, though, I decided that the texture of the paint itself did enough to suggest movement, and let it be, though I did add a few pencil marks to the edges of the diagonal section, just to emphasise it slightly.  And that's it.  I'm quite pleased, all in all, not bad for using up excess paint.