art of March

"March Girl" 

"March Girl" was finished this afternoon. Here is a picture of the whole completed canvas, measuring 75 x 54cm at the moment, but will end up more like 68 x 47cm when stapled over stretcher.

Thanks for your comment Caitlin! Any and all comments are welcome from readers - whether long, short and sweet or complimentary or critical. I also invite readers to make suggestions for naming the works!...I will always give these serious consideration and happily use them if they feel right to me! I always struggle with choosing names, my aptitude is with the visual not the textual! So unless somebody is inspired to make a suggestion for this one she will retain the title "March Girl"....

Here is a close up detail of the face. The stitching to simulate strands of hair took much patience and felt a test of my skill. To achieve some of the subtlety of colour tones I used very thin layers of felting fibre, dyed in multiple hues, which were laid onto the background painting and stitched over with free motion stitching. I used 9 different colours of embroidery thread to do the hair effects.

I have enjoyed the process of creating March Girl. Getting the faces right is so often a struggle but this one came together remarkably quickly (don't ask me about hands!!!! sheeeesh! I try to avoid them altogether! arrrrrghh!) From beginning to finish today the whole picture took 3 days or about 20-25 hours which is about as quick as I work.

Tomorrow I'll start a new work. I have researched the idea and have the canvas prepared. This next one will be a face only. I am already thinking beyond that to the next work!

An update on my broken ankle. I will still be off work until at least the end of this month. The X-ray I had 2 weeks ago showed the bones are being slow to knit together. A blood test showed I'm a little low in vitamin D, quite common for women over 50 but I have started taking Vit D supplements at Doctors advice to avert the potential of developing osteoporosis.