textile portrait

A textile portrait exploring texture, dimension, and playful storytelling through layered yarn, felt, and mixed media elements.

ORIGINAL IMAGE

For this project, I was instructed to make a portrait of someone, so I chose my cat. I used yarn to make my cat, tissue paper for the cat tree, fuzzy pom poms for the clouds, and felt for the background and extra pieces.

Finished piece

Exhibited at Maryland Institute College of Art

Scroll through to see my process

  • skecth

    Sketch

    I first started on Procreate, and drew where I wanted, which colors of yarn to be.

  • base

    I used cardboard as my substarte and glued index cards on the cardboard to make a white background. Then I used Elmers glue and tissue paper to start on the pink cat tree. I wrinkled it as I glue it to give it more texture.

  • Green bench

    Yarn

    I printed out my sketch and started hot-gluing yarn onto the paper.

  • process

    I finished hot-gluing the yearn but I didn’t like the way the yarn sat so I decided to do another layer of yarn.

  • Cat final

    I finally finished hot-gluing all the yarn (hours of work).

  • expanding substarte

    I decided I wanted this piece to be bigger, so I added more cardboard, index cards, and tissue paper.

  • finished piece

    I glued felt to the index cards so the background could look cleaner. Then I added tree-like pieces to the cat tree, a sky, and fish toy elements to represent outside, which my cat thinks she’s in.