Working with 3-dimensional elements

 

by Regina Marzlin (reginamarzlin.com)

I belong to an online international art quilt group called "Cloth in Common" (www.clothincommon.com). We are 12 artists from around the world, from New Zealand, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Netherlands, USA and Canada. Every second month, one of us gives out a prompt or theme, and everyone creates an artwork that responds to the theme. Our overarching theme this year is "Structures", so we had prompts like "Building", "Anatomy", and "Light". The latest prompt was "Cells", which led to some amazing artworks - you can see them on our blog.

I decided to go with red blood cells, as I find the biconcave disk shape appealing and the vibrant red colour is so lively. The finished artwork is titled "In the Blood", it is 25.5" wide and 39.5" high.

 I decided to actually make the individual disks as 3-D shapes to be applied to the surface of the quilt. Approximately 2.4 million red blood cells are produced per second in a human adult! That is a staggering number. I settled for the more manageable number of 44, and even that was a lot of work as it took me about 15 minutes to make one – cutting out, sewing the rounds, stuffing, sewing shut, and sewing the middle indent.

The black-on-white print of the blood vessels was done on a gel plate with acrylic paint. I printed two lengths of cloth to go on each side of the middle blood vessel. 

To bring in a bit more colour I decided to use a red Inktense pencil to outline the blood vessels.

It was fun attaching the blood cells to the quilted surface, I was able to overlap and stagger and really play with the three-dimensional idea of this design.

Title In the Blood
Regina Marzlin
Dimensions: h 39.5″ x w 25.5″
Material: cotton fabrics, acrylic paint, Inktense pencil
Technique: mono-printing, painting, applique, machine quilting