Embroidery in Illustration

A lot of decisions have been reached, and a myriad more questions have surfaced. Most regarding the nature of art and illustration. Decisions on media, narrative and research, while mentally taxing, result in definite thoughts and actions. Journeys have begun, and I am relying on my love of character creation to illustrate these journeys and ideas. Next week I will undertake a really fun (an I do mean really fun) project, where over the five-day working week I collect a Metro, cut out appropriate imagery the make a composite something, and draw a character and situation interacting with said composite something. This illustrates the tremendous fun to be had in cutting and sticking - experiment and play, and using and responding to existent imagery. That was the plan. Turns out I got so excited about the idea that I decided to do three trial runs, and came up with:


His name is Javier (with a normal English J, he tells the people who think he is Spanish and therefore requires a usually incorrect extra effort at pronunciation) Columbus, a travelling wildlife photographer. The travel and animal stories are always a delight amongst the harrowing or boring rest-of-paper, and this is probably what inspired his creation, along with the anything-goes first image, where the look of him stuck. Javier travels to distant lands (the origin of these creatures is extracted from the newspaper; places forgotten or far afield) and documents them for his Journal of Experimental Biology. They get their names from the weirdest-sounding capitalised words (names), and if I come across a magnificent adjective I add that in too. :] And then I pretend that this is work.

Then the concept of embroidery in illustration occurred to me.
Firstly, research. There are some incredibly prolific people in the field; some favourites I have discovered are Louise Gardiner and Takashi Iwasaki. These geniuses show what is possible with the medium, and their work is something to aspire to.
Embroidery is a way of working with line and colour that results in a tactile object. We all love fabrics. The possibility of using objects (I have a great collection of feathers and rusty knuts) is also there.
I need to get out all things embroidery (including past work), lay them out, photograph them, and then I will have a better understanding of what my options are.

The limitations I have set up (and I suppose I am referring back to the 100 Drawings Project idea) are that the narratives I tell tales with are confined to postcard-sized fold-outs. Books, or zines, indeed. I have my introduction, my owl-headed deity of passion, who will be huge. Her size, of course, is limited by the size of the paper I can work on. A1 (watercolour) paper is accessible, and I hear talk of A0, but I'm not sure if I can get my hands on it. I will be looking at paper (and will enjoy it!) later today, and hopefully decisions (hopefully not-too-expensive ones) will be reached on this front.

Sunday edit: Thanks to this site and this site, I relearned a few embroidery techniques. I looked through all available materials for the project, selected the most appropriate fabric, and did a little freeform embroidery, which resulted in this:

Yesterday I visited the AMAZING Museum of Brands, Packaging & Advertising, which resulted in this Flickr set of sneaky photos. Words cannot express the wonders it held. But no paper yet.
It seems that I'm drawing visual influence from the works of two artist/illustration studios I've followed for a long time: Apak and GhostPatrol.