2009 Calendar Girls - January

For 2009 the Calendar Girls have made some changes. We have a couple of new members and this time each of us is choosing a calendar page as inspiration for a particular month. This month it was my turn and I selected my favourite Shane Pickett painting " Wanyarang Storm Against the Wind" which was used in a calendar celebrating the wonderful array of Australian Indigenous art. I love this painting on several levels - the colours really really grab me (and they are the colours I live with here on the edge of the desert), the texture and subtle movement really really appeal and then I just love the pureness and abstractness of the image. So with all this inspiration, what did I make!?

Shane Pickett " Wanyarang Storm Against the Wind"

In the end, after considering many options, I used fabric, house paint, texture paste, multiple layers of acrylic paint and glimmer mists and metallic rub-ons to make my interpretative fabric postcard (based on my recent learnings from the wonderful FibreIn Form online workshop in Textured Surfaces). In an effort not to be too literal, I used miniature white eyelets to create the two rows of white dots. What was I thinking? They are awful to use at the best of time but in a textured fabric base and en masse they are quadruply awful. These was much gnashing of teeth and abandoned use of a hammer but submission of sorts was achieved. The texture paste was used on top of the household paint with a circular stencil to create the swirling movements of the storm and the texture on the earth.

Look here (it is the first of the textured surfaces) to see what the fabric looked like with its first layers of paint and then below is what it looked like before I trimmed it to postcard size (that was hard as I liked it that size!) and added the final layers.