Starting to pick out accents on Wall Hanging

This project is going a little better than the other one.  At this stage I am experimenting with picking out some of the different lace in different colors of purple to see how they look.  It doesn't look unified yet. 

One thing that is surprising me about this piece is how I am NOT really liking the dark purple peeking out from behind the lace.  It is more "drastic" than I planned, and because it doesn't have iridescence, it looks like black holes or something behind the lace pieces.  But I think I have some ways I can tone that down.  Here's an overall view:

Next I have included a couple of closer-up views:

Now, clearly this needs more work, but it is coming along.  I thought that I needed to accent the skinnier lace, but I think I need to accent the flatter, wider lace as well.  For the next round, I think I will accent that as well, but I will probably apply the paint lightly with a finger rather than a brush or a round foam applicator for a lighter touch.  In previous pieces the effect has been too "heavy" with this type of lace.  The holes inbetween are quite large.

Also, this stage is where I encountered the difficulty with the dark purple being a distraction to the piece.  I decided to do two things:  (1) Apply a glitter spray to see if that masked the lack of iridescence in that layer, and (2) Try the wash again, but a really weak one.

The glitter did just about nothing.  Don't take me wrong, I like glitter, but it didn't help in this case.  I'll be painting over most of it and will have to re-apply it later.  Oh well, nothing was messed up, anyway.  No biggie.  

The wash actually helped a little.  I made a REALLY weak one because I was spooked about what happened last time, but I think I made it a little too weak.  I did  the weak wash with Halo Violet Gold so I wouldn't mess anything up by it being too dark.  If anything, I erred on the light side, but at least I didn't hurt anything.  The downsides were that it took a long time to do because there is so much texture on this piece and it took a long time to dry.  But overall I think the piece does look more unified now.  I don't have a photo of that yet--I'm planning to wait for daylight tomorrow.  

Major lesson learned:  Lay down a layer of iridescent paint before I lay down lace.  I didn't here because of the large area--I was concerned with how much paint it would take.  I thought it would work to have just a good color.  Nope.  Next time I'll know better.

I am, on the other hand, really liking the scrim background "stripes" on this piece.  I think it gives the piece a lot more interest than a plain background (like the Battenburg piece).  I plan to try this method again, along with another one that I have up my sleeve.

Oh, a small bummer--the small butterflies I ordered are a teeny bit too large for this piece.  Oh well, that just means I can use them for something else!  I'm mentally planning a series of smaller pieces.  But, later!  

Some first attempts at iridescence on Wall Hanging

This was the first attempt at adding iridescence.  I think the gold got to be a bit much.

Here's a closeup.
These pictures are a few days old.  Immediately after this I'm going to post another set where I've done quite a few more things to the piece.  I think the composition is OK on this; now I have to figure out the best way to accent certain pieces while having a unified look.  I'll be conducting some experiments on that this week.

More on the Battenburg piece

Sorry for the delay in posting.  Grrr--Blogger has NOT been playing nice with uploading pictures.  Yesterday, I was planning to post, I promise, but it kept "freezing" in the middle of uploading.  I finally got frustrated and gave up because we were getting ready to go to a friend's house for dinner.

So, when I read that my only really regular reader was waiting for another post, I felt guilty.  I had thought I would wait until tomorrow, but I decided to give it another try.  And on the third try, it worked.  I have at least one other post in the pipeline, so we'll see how that one goes.

Anyhoo, my DH was wanting me to try different areas of color instead of tiny dabs of color mixed together (my typical style).  I am trying to work on this but am having trouble.  Here's one try:

Ummm, well!  Hmmm.  Not so great.  OK, I thought, let's try to unify this piece somehow.  I've heard people talk about doing a "wash."  Why not mix half paint and half water and paint over it?  I chose gold.  Ummm, well!  It washed, all right!  I now had a gold piece, and the lace still looked lighter than the background.  It was Not A Good Thing.  Lesson learned:  Use a lot less paint when trying to do a "wash."  

I couldn't even stand to take a picture of it.

Alllllrighty, lets brush some dark blue paint over that lace so I can at least SEE the thing.  Then I ended up with a little excess purple from another project and added that.
Okeydokey.  Well, the good thing is that I can SEE it!  I think I need to work on this piece some more.  But I have learned two important things:  (1) Use a much weaker "wash," and (2) Even with a complicated lace motif, you need something in the background or it's blah.  I'm not liking the Lutradur by itself as well.  I do have a couple of subtle backgrounds in mind when I try my next lace motif piece.  So this is a valuable learning experience.  I think I can still salvage this piece, but I'm waiting for a little inspiration.

When I mention my DH talking about different large areas of color, he was referring to the photos I've shown him of the work at Stitchtherapy that I have linked at the side.  I don't know how she does that, but the effect is marvelous.  It has defined areas yet is a unified piece.  I clearly have much more to learn!  If anyone can enlighten me, I would welcome suggestions on how to achieve that kind of look.