…Hence the reason we learn to talk about the details. And more importantly, WRITE about them. Mine probably could have been longer because I talk a whole lot but here is my write up and my images around my experience with the textile project:
Sometimes you have jobs to do or orders to fill that you’re excited about until you start thinking about everything you have to do to get it done. Then it’s not that you’re not still excited, but you’re LESS excited than you were before but there’s another part to it. …When you get motivated and start going through the motions to work on it, often you find yourself in this very focused and peaceful state of mind. After a while you are once again completely committed and devoted to its completion and making it the best it can be even if it’s going to require more than you planned to put in or even had the time to put in initially.
When I first started sketching my idea on my pad, I thought it was a pretty cool one. As I progressed, I wasn’t sure but decided I would follow through with it and see what happened as opposed to changing it. I transferred my images to my fabric on pencil by laying it over my sketch & tracing it. I decided that instead of using pencils, markers or even crayons I would use acrylic paint. I got concerned that the paint may absorb into the fabric too much & start to bleed which would mean my images could get blurry or fuzzy and my lines would not be precise, clean and clear. I felt like I had a pretty good solution which was just to use a neutral colored paint to go over my images first, allow it to dry and then go over it with the actual colors. That way my second layer of paint would not bleed through or “run” and my lines would stay pretty clean. I had to thin out my paint a bit in order to make my strokes flow easier on the fabric. I love color and had used a lot of colors in this one as
well as some very small details like silhouettes with small noses and lips and things that I didn’t want to get lost. …By this time I was committed to the outcome anyway and wouldn’t have felt as good if I started cutting corners and I knew that. My sketch was pretty good and now I needed to see if I could do that in a way I’d be happy with on fabric.
After I got it all painted I had to go in and tighten up my lines and used my sharpie to create my black outlines as opposed to the paint brush which just wouldn’t have been able to give me as fine a line as I needed. The name of my textile print is “Black Girls and Butterflies”. I named it this partially because it was the first thing that came to mind and second because I love what butterflies represent: transformation. They begin as one thing, cocoon, come out only to have evolved into this beautiful creature. From a personal standpoint, I feel like it’s similar to the journey of being a black girl or just a girl or woman in general (but of course I’m a black girl so that is what I know). It is a journey full of constant transformations, adjustments and changes. It is a colorful and
colorFILLED experience that always involves some aspect of healing without fail. Incorporating the blue butterfly was my symbol of healing. Blue is a healing color. The more I thought about it, I felt like it was even more relevant to our class group! …A class full of little black girls that are in the midst of an experience that will change them in some way. This is also true for me as a teacher. In whatever way the change comes, it will ultimately contribute to our growth and development as artists and young women and no matter how that happens one thing we can all be sure of is that it will beautiful and contribute to our beauty.
