Art Quill Studio
The Education Division of Art Quill & Co. Pty. Ltd.
Art Quill Studio Director: Marie-Therese Wisniowski.
This site will feature a new post each week centred on the following categories: ArtCloth, Art Glossaries, Fiber Arts, Prints on Paper, Textile Arts, Wearable Arts, and include posts from our publishing house that are pertinent to each of these categories.
Introduction Kristi O'Meara is a surface designer & illustrator based Chicago, IL. She is the founder of design studio and blog, The Patternbase. She received her bachelor of fine arts in 2009 from the Kansas City Art Institute, where she studied painting, design, and fiber arts. Kristi released her first publication, The Pattern Base: Over 550 Contemporary Textile and Surface Designs through Thames & Hudson Publishing in 2015. Her work has been featured in Chicago Magazine, IdN, Cool Hunting, CS | Modern Luxury, and Dutch Elle, among others.
For more information about her career, activities and interests please click on the following link - Kristy O'Meara
Representational Designs of Kristi O'Meara[1]
Dandelion Ducks (2013).
Ants Attack (2013).
White Worms (2012).
Chevron Beetle Wings (2012).
Worms (2012).
Playful Polyphemus (2012).
Mesoamerican Idols (2012).
Happy Gnomes (2011).
Kachina Dance (2011).
Homestead (2011).
Tentacle Mosaic (2012).
Reference: [1] K. O'Meara, The Pattern Base, Thames & Hudson London (2015).
If you like any of my artworks in the above links, please email me at - Marie-Therese - for pricing and for any other enquiries.
Introduction I have been designing my hand dyed and hand printed fabric lengths using a range of fabrics and multiple surface design techniques. As a professional senior graphic designer/illustrator in a previous career, I have always had an interest in creating imagery, prints, illustrations, posters and publications using digital processes. This interest has led me to some fascinating explorations in the field of digitally created fabrics and textiles. This post focusses on my new range of original, digitally designed tea towels. The eco-friendly textile printed tea towels have been chosen from a number of my personal design collections which feature at the following link: My Spoonflower Fabrics.
Numerous surface design techniques have been used to create the various textile design collections which have been translated into the digital print format to create superb complimentary colorways. The colors have been sensitively and painstakingly created to encompass the specific concepts associated with each contemporary collection. Each unique design employs a mirror repeat pattern technique. My ArtCloth tea towel designs are printed edge to edge over the entire item.
A New Collection of My Digitally Designed ArtCloth Tea Towels These uniquely crafted tea towels are perfect for lint free drying of dishes and add an individual and colorful statement to your kitchen decor. To complement the tea towel design, other products, such as table cloths, placemats, table runners, dinner napkins, and pillows can also be crafted to create a highly personalized and co-ordinated kitchen and dining home décor experience.
The tea towels measure 16 inches in width x 24 inches in height and are printed onto natural white, eco-friendly linen-cotton-canvas fabric. The hems are folded and topstitched, and a white hang tab is included on the back of the tea towel. The tea towels soften and become more absorbent with use.
If you would like to purchase any of my ArtCloth tea towels please email me at - Marie-Therese - for pricing and/or any other information. There is no minimum order and they would make a lovely gift for your friends and family to boot!
To view the various colorways that are available in my Artquill Collections at Spoonflower click on the following - My Spoonflower Fabrics.
Title: ‘Fleeting.’ My ArtCloth Tea Towel Collection. Comment: The tea towel design is one of three complementary colorways.
Title: ‘LRSP.’ My ArtCloth Tea Towel Collection. Comment: The tea towel design is one of five complementary colorways.
Title: ‘Wall Flower.’ My ArtCloth Tea Towel Collection. Comment: The tea towel design is one of five complementary colorways.
Title: ‘Waxing Lyrical.’ My ArtCloth Tea Towel Collection. Comment: The tea towel design is one of four complementary designs.
Title: ‘Celebratory Fireworks.’ My ArtCloth Tea Towel Collection. Comment: The tea towel design is one of five complementary colorways.
Title: ‘Leaves Transformed.’ My ArtCloth Tea Towel Collection. Comment: The tea towel design is one of six complementary colorways.
There have been one hundred and thirteen posts in a previous Art Resource series that focused on the following topics:
(i) Units used in dyeing and printing of fabrics.
(ii) Occupational, health & safety issues in an art studio.
(iii) Color theories and color schemes.
(iv) Optical properties of fiber materials.
(v) General properties of fiber polymers and fibers - Part I to Part V.
(vi) Protein fibers.
(vii) Natural and man-made cellulosic fibers.
(viii) Fiber blends and melt spun fibers.
(ix) Fabric construction.
(x) Techniques and woven fibers.
(xi) Basic and figured weaves.
(xii) Pile, woven and knot pile fabrics.
(xiii) Napped fabrics, double cloth and multicomponent fabrics.
(xiv) Fabric finishes.
(xv) Schrinkage, durable press and wash-wear finishes.
(xvi) Classification of dyes and dye blends.
(xvii) The general theory of printing.
To access any of the above resources click on the following link - Units Used in Dyeing and Printing of Fabrics. This link highlights the one hundred and thirteen posts in the previous Art Resource series.
If you find any post on this blog site useful, you can save it or copy and paste it into your own "Word" document for your future reference. For example, Safari allows you to save a post (e.g., click on "File", click on "Print" and release, click on "PDF" and then click on "Save As" and release - and a PDF should appear where you have stored it). Safari also allows you to mail a post to a friend (e.g., click on "File", and then point cursor to "Mail Contents On This Page" and release). Either way, this or any of the other posts on this site may be a useful Art Resource for you.
The new Art Resource series will be the first post in each calendar month. Remember, these Art Resource posts span information that will be useful for a home hobbyist to that required by a final year University Fine-Art student. Undoubtedly, some parts of any Art Resource post may appear far too technical for your needs (skip those mind boggling parts) and whilst other parts may be too simplistic with respect to your level of knowledge (ditto the skip). Hopefully, the trade-off between these two extremes will mean that the Art Resource posts will be useful in parts to most, but unfortunately, may not be satisfying to all!
Painting Art - Part V[1] (i) Balanced Formulas
In the formulation of a liquid paint in the establishment of a painting technique, there is another fundamental consideration which may be called the "balance of solubility." A certain balance or relation must be maintained between the resistance of the coating, the solvent action of subsequent brush strokes, and the solvent or dispersing power of the liquid used. For instance, the gum binder of water color is completely soluble in water, yet dry paint is sufficiently resistant so that it is possible to apply subsequent brush strokes without it; on the other hand, the paint is so reistant that it cannot be softened or run into when the painter so desires.
The wet paint itself may be instantly diluted or thinned with its normal solvent, water. A poorly-made water color paint, or one which could be called unbalanced in this respect, might be picked up and completely removed at the touch of a wet brush or it might be too dry and too resistant to water to be worked into when desired. The best water color paints are perfectly balanced and adjusted to the normal water color techniques.
In the oil painting technique, the turpentine or mineral spirit has sufficient solvent action to function as a thinner for the wet paint and also to dissolve the freshly applied or recently dried coating if scrubbed into it, yet a freshly dried surface will not pick up, spread or dissolve away if over painted in the correct manner.
Oil paint can be freely mixed and blended if desired. It can be made to set quickly enough to withstand solvent action of further strokes without running in with them, or it can be made to remain plastic long enough for most normal working procedures. If a glaze or overpainting contains acetone, or some other powerful solvent, the underpainting might be pick up or it might spread.
For you techincal enthusiasts, a schematic indication of physicochemical processes that occur simultaneously during cleaning operations, is altogether defined as solvent action. After and during the dissolution of varnish (orange), the paint matrix (yellow) expands in size (shaded yellow) due to the uptake of solvent (blue). The relative thickness of the layers indicated does not represent the actual thickness. The (b) to (e) schematics are examples of possible structure in the polymeric binding medium in oil paint.
(b) Aged ionomeric binding medium with metal carboxylates and high degree of cross-linking;
(c) Cracked ionomeric binding medium with metal carboxylates and high degree of cross-linking (shown crack diameters are not to scale);
(d) Ionomeric binding medium with metal carboxylates and low degree of cross-linking;
(e) Highly oxidized binding medium with intermediate degree of cross-linking and a high concentration of free carboxylic acid groups.
To artists, one of the principal disadvantages of many of the modern lacquers and synthetic resins in painting is they are insoluble in all, but the most powerfully solvent and highly volatile liquids, thus creating obstacles to controlled manipulations.
Some of our traditional techniques are less flexible and their manipulations do not involve the same degree of solubility of recently applied color - for example, fresco and egg tempera, in which the brush strokes if correctly applied are not altered by overpainting and where such effects as gradations of color, tone or shade are normally achieved by hatching or by applying separate strokes.
Other techniques demand various degrees of solubility in their materials, and the standards for paint formulas and ingredients, brushes, grounds, and manipulations used in each vary widely according to its requirements. The fulfillment of all such requirements demands a balance and a proportion in the formulation or design and correct compounding of ingradients.
Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. Implied texture is what we see in this painting – this means the way an object looks as if it would feel, if you could touch it. Da Vinci did not create actual texture by building up paint. It is a visual texture that is evident in the painting.
(ii) Color Stability
One of the prime requirements of a permanent painting technique for artists' use is color stability - the ability of a final dry paint coating to retain its original color effect and the relationship between its colors without any fading, darkening, or change in hue. From the earliest days of painting as a highly developed craft, this matter has been one of the major concerns of painters; it is of fundamental importance in the practice of creative art.
Boston art restoration.
Reference: [1] The Artist's Handbook of Materials and Techniques, R. Mayer, (ed. E. Smith) 4th Edition, Faber and Faber, London (1981).
Dandelion Ducks (2013).
Ants Attack (2013).
White Worms (2012).
Chevron Beetle Wings (2012).
Worms (2012).
Playful Polyphemus (2012).
Mesoamerican Idols (2012).
Happy Gnomes (2011).
Kachina Dance (2011).
Homestead (2011).
Tentacle Mosaic (2012).
