My childhood friend Rachely has a new phone with a camera and has been posting beautiful nature photos mostly from her neighborhood on Facebook. Her lovely photos have sparked a conversation between Rachely and her friends about honesty and photo editing.
I have been using a digital camera for a long time now. One of my frustrations with a digital camera, actually with cameras, in general, is that they don't always capture what your eye is seeing. I might be drawn to take a photo because of a particularly beautiful quality of light. Once I take the photo the quality that drew my eye, might be missing in the photo. I feel that this is an honest use of photo editing.
With the magic of photo editing, I can show what it was that my eye actually saw. I have also discovered over time that while digital cameras are wonderful, they have fairly limited digital brains. I bump up to the limited abilities of my digital camera when photographing some of my work.
I am working on creating a tallit bag to go with this tallit.
What you see here is the burn-out hand-dyed velvet tallit and the atara I worked on for this tallit. My client decided she wanted a bag to go with this tallit. She wanted it to really go with/match the tallit.
Using the lovely silk/rayon burnout velvet was not an option. It is simply too fragile to use in a tallit bag. I thought that if I stenciled the leaf and flower motif onto a stronger fabric in a color similar to the tallit it might work.
My client loved a bit of velvet which was an off-cut from a larger piece that I had dyed. The original color of the velvet was a soft buttery yellow. By the time my client saw it, it was a variegated green with lots of the soft yellow still visible.
After several more layers of dye applied in thin layers,
the velvet looked like this. I added more layers of color.
I also cut stencils based on the floral design on the fabric in the tallit.
I tried them out using oil paint sticks.
Oil paint sticks look like fat crayons, but instead of having the pigment impregnated in wax like a regular crayon, the pigments are impregnated into oil. They smell kind of terrible but the colors are luminous. After a few days, your project stops smelling like rotten fish.
It was time for me to try my stencils on the actual velvet.
There are about seven layers of dyes in several different colors. My camera kept reading the fabric as chartreuse. it wasn't the color my eye saw. I kept playing with different ways to edit the color to show what I was actually seeing. I finally figured it out.
I didn't photograph an earlier iteration of the stenciling that looked kind of terrible. After much teeth gnashing I realized that not only did the dyes need to be layered, but the stenciling had to be done in layers as well.
I have been using a digital camera for a long time now. One of my frustrations with a digital camera, actually with cameras, in general, is that they don't always capture what your eye is seeing. I might be drawn to take a photo because of a particularly beautiful quality of light. Once I take the photo the quality that drew my eye, might be missing in the photo. I feel that this is an honest use of photo editing.
With the magic of photo editing, I can show what it was that my eye actually saw. I have also discovered over time that while digital cameras are wonderful, they have fairly limited digital brains. I bump up to the limited abilities of my digital camera when photographing some of my work.
I am working on creating a tallit bag to go with this tallit.
Using the lovely silk/rayon burnout velvet was not an option. It is simply too fragile to use in a tallit bag. I thought that if I stenciled the leaf and flower motif onto a stronger fabric in a color similar to the tallit it might work.
My client loved a bit of velvet which was an off-cut from a larger piece that I had dyed. The original color of the velvet was a soft buttery yellow. By the time my client saw it, it was a variegated green with lots of the soft yellow still visible.
After several more layers of dye applied in thin layers,
I also cut stencils based on the floral design on the fabric in the tallit.
It was time for me to try my stencils on the actual velvet.
I didn't photograph an earlier iteration of the stenciling that looked kind of terrible. After much teeth gnashing I realized that not only did the dyes need to be layered, but the stenciling had to be done in layers as well.
This isn't a copy of the tallit but it will work well with it.
And if the real subject of this post is problem-solving this is another example of that skill.
My sister's mother-in-law was a classic Upper West Side academic. She was fiercely smart and as fiercely chic. She was buying antiques from flea markets before it was a thing. One of the things she collected were cashmere sweaters. A few years before she died she gave me a few from her collection including this baby pink sweater.
After several years of wearing this sweater, it developed moth holes. A few years ago I mended the holes and added sequins to cover the holes. I understood that moth holes ar probably the reason for embellished cashmere sweaters. They were just too expensive to toss just because of a few holes. I had only embellished one side of the sweater.
A few more moth holes got me to repair the other side of the sweater.
I always remember my sisters mother-in-law with great fondness when I wear this sweater. I almost never wear baby pink.
The sequins come from the stash of a friend's late mother. It just feels nice to keep the memory of these two women alive, at least for me.
And one last note for those of you who care about numbers, this blog has just passed 400,000 views. Thank you for reading. It really does mean a great deal to me.
On the other side of the coin, after I work on a piece for a while, my mind sees what my intentions are, not necessarily what it really looks like. A colored pen drawing I was afraid to make "too bright" was actually too light-colored when I took a photo; the flowers in a painting I was afraid to "overdo" were actually too monochromatic, and needed more color and more shadows. And a quilt whose final layout just wasn't right was simply misarranged, with too much contrast between adjacent blocks... So sometimes that literal view of the camers's lens helps solve a problem. It can be especially helpful to share it remotely with my art teacher or sewing buddy for help.
ReplyDeleteOnly saw this now. Thanks for the wise elaboration on the subject matter. And your work is amazingly beautiful, Sarah.
ReplyDeleteMay you always continue creating and loving what you do.
I am so happy you saw this Rachely because after I posted this I thought about how much you must edit your own writing so that it is more true to the real meaning one wants to convey.
DeleteI often remember the two of us working on a poster together on the floor of Rabbi Brazil's class. You drafted the letters because your lettering was so much prettier than mine and we carefully colored them in together, each letter different as we chatted away. I have no recollection what that poster was for but that memory of working together is such a fond one.