I’m not a photographic purist. I just love taking photos. From the drips on a coffee cup to the textures in wood and beyond, I find it interesting. I know some of my friends look at me a little strange when I  suddenly become pre-occupied in the midst of a conversation and I turn my head to capture just the right image…then out comes the camera.!!

My images are taken to capture the essence of what I see and all of my textile art with the exception of a few whimsical pieces that float from my head have come from my photos.

I shared my ideas with a group the other day. It was extremely hot, well over 100 and we went out for a few hours before returning to the coolness of the classroom. I believe in quality not quantity and yes, we could have gone to the car cemetery, but I figured, 3 installations were enough in that heat.

I’m going to share with you some of the images I took and in the past week and show you how I’ve transformed them into images for textile art.

This is the result of my playing with color and Texture in the computer. I’m not using anything fancy. No Photoshop layers. (I can do it in photoshop of course) but I chose a product called Smart Photo Editor. It costs about $59 instead of the $800 needed for photoshop. (actually you can get it for $25 right now).

Quite simply, I’m using pre existing filters to get this image and its quite simple to do. This would look wonderful printed onto fabric and thats just what I’m going to do.

How on earth did this image become the image below?

Or this rather boring image of a cross become an entire quilt design.

The chairs on a wall become a poster or print.

And the images below just came. You will notice that I’m actually isolating a single image, making it the focus of the picture and then working other textures into the piece. I could make prints on paper or fabric, but the combination of layers is my way of auditioning for a quilt design.

The images below are just purely to capture texture and color.

Now take this photo for example. It’s a wonderful Bison head made from mixed media. I found it in the capital building in Santa Fe, I  snapped the image and then the last two photos have been changed to an illustrative photo.

I’ve not given away all my secrets, but this is something very simple you can do at home to get you on the pathway to designing your own spectacular piece of Textile Art.