A little more negativity

I’m still playing around with the idea of negative space,
partly because it makes the background to an embroidery as important as it
should be. Probably as a result of all the painting I’ve been doing recently, I’m
beginning to dislike the idea of a design hanging vaguely somewhere in mid-air.
As a result I’ve been working on designs where the background is stitched and
detailed, but the “design” itself is left plain.

 Of course if you leave the “embroidery area” absolutely
bare of detail, it won't be particularly interesting, so I
started off by scrubbing some colours onto a piece of fabric.

The fabric is roughly painted…

 Then I digitised a simple linear background to it and stitched it on to the painted fabric. There is no stitching over the flower: all the stitched detail is on the background area

…and the background stitched over it

I quite like the combination of the rough, impressionistic
painting and the precise lines of the stitching, and I have a few ideas of how
to extend this idea further