An embroidered panel of naturally dyed wool

Limbering up for a month of daily drawings of gouache paintings

August has come to a close, and this month’s daily drawings are complete… all rubber stamps. This one has proved to be a little more time consuming, but they were mostly each completed within 15 minutes. Although it’s a technique I’m pretty familiar with, it’s still been a good learning exercise. Working out how best to simplify shapes, deal with negative space and incorporate fine details for stalks or petal markings. I now have a good stash of flowery rubber stamps that I can hopefully use in future projects.

Like the month of wax crayons, there’s a cohesion to the finished sheet of rubber stamps that comes from working with a set colour palette. I’m looking forward to mixing my own colours again next month though, when I’ll be using gouache for my daily drawings. I had a practice by doing a quick painting of a vase of flowers, and I think I’ll try to incorporate some coloured paper backgrounds to my daily drawing grid to make the inclusion of white flowers more possible.

As the month ended, I also finished a small embroidered panel I’ve been working on using naturally dyed yarn. I’m enjoying discovering the potential of embroidering with wool, relying on texture to build up a surface. It’s been a real pleasure choosing the colours and to see how they look together and interact with each other. There have been times over the past year when it’s felt like most of my dye results yield some form of ochre or brown, but this is encouraging proof that the palette is much wider than that.