I’m really enjoying our painting group, run by artist Frances Crawford, who lives locally (http://www.francescrawfordart.com/). It’s not easy for me to make the change from drawing to painting, and from design to more serious art, but it’s definitely going to be worth making the effort.
One thing that Frances has been emphasizing is the use of background in compositions. “Background” is a difficult concept to carry over to embroidery, where the design is usually composed in isolation, and whatever background there might be is left to the person who stitches it out. If there is a background at all, it’s often just a series of simple stitched lines, like the fishes I posted on 5 November, or this bird
The only background is an area of simple contour lines
So I’ve been thinking about the different backgrounds you might have for an embroidered image. You could paint a background specifically for a particular design, like this one.
Bird embroidered on a piece of fabric painted to suit the design
Or you could incorporate some embroidery on a painted background, to draw the background and the main image together.
The background to these fish is a combination of embroidery and painted fabric
But the best way is to design the background and the main object together, like these two animals from a series I did a while back, inspired by the Waterhouse terra-cotta animals on London's Natural History Museum. Of course the problem here is that not all designs are suitable for this treatment, and it does perhaps restrict the use of the design. But it makes the design richer and more attractive to the eye, and it’s something that I will be working with in the future
The background of foliage was designed around the animals and is an integral part of the composition