I started some stacked houses in my sketchbook a while back but I never followed up on them. So recently as I thought about what to create, I decided to go back to those sketches and start from there. In this post, I’m going to show you the process I went through in creating my newest piece – Stacked Houses #1. Here’s the original sketch I started with. As you can see, it’s not much of a sketch. It was just an initial idea, that I planned on investigating later. That’s why I often say that just start with whatever you’ve got, don’t wait to have it all figured out before you do. Later, I tweaked it a little bit more to get this:

It’s still not much. But it was all I needed to get started. Usually, I’ll shade this in my sketchbook to get a sense of where to place values, but I didn’t do that here. I traced it onto a white backing fabric with a heat erasable marker.

And then I stitched over the tracing with my sewing machine to get this.

The white fabric is not the fabric I want to work on. I traced and stitched on this fabric because it’s white and easier to see my traced and stitched lines. I flipped over my sandwich to get this reflected image:

As you can see from the progression, I went back and forth toying with the idea of windows, but I didn’t commit to them long enough to stitch them into my tracing. I’ll come back to the topic of windows later. Now I was all set to start stitching/shading. Since I hadn’t investigated shading values in my sketchbook, from here on everything is improvisational. I had no pre-planned course of action. After the first couple of stitches, here’s what I got:

Then a little more progress:

And finally, by varying thread colors, stitch direction, stitch distance and stitch thickness I finished it.

As you can see, I revisited the windows and added them to my final drawing. I wasn’t exactly happy about their height, though.  I think they may have been a little too high.  But I’m very pleased with the contrast they added to the drawing, in that they are different in function and in execution – line drawings vs shaded drawings. I created a demo video for you to see how I worked on this piece. Enjoy and share!!!

In Conclusion

All in all, I’m happy I explored this idea of stacked houses and followed my vision to create this piece. This is what I visualized in my mind when I started “Stitch the Sketch“. Several years ago as a child, these were the type of drawings I saw at my local art center.  At the time, I thought only special people- naturally gifted and talented people, could come up with such sketches. Fast forward to today and I can do this, not just in pencil but in a medium I had no knowledge of when I was a little girl. I feel truly blessed to be able to create art. Warmest Regards,       SaveSave SaveSave SaveSave SaveSave