The Story of a Harris Tweed Painting

This is the story behind my latest Harris Tweed painting of snowdrops.

​The main feature of Rock Village where I live in Northumberland is the mill pond, which is surrounded by woodland and in February these woodlands are covered in a carpet of snowdrops. They are such a welcome sight as it means that winter will be over soon and this year I was inspired to do a picture of them.  ​I spent quite a bit of time lying flat on my stomach amongst the snowdrops, as carefully as I could to avoid causing too much damage and took lots of photos and the above video. I got a few strange looks from dog walkers.but never mind.

In the end I decided to create a composite picture based on what it was like to be right down amongst the snowdrops, rather than standing above them and looking down. This is the line drawing I came up with.

I always start my pictures with a line drawing. I cut this line drawing up and use the pieces as you would a dressmaker's pattern, pinning them to the tweeds to make sure that I cut them all to exactly the right size and shape. I then often stick the picture back together again to use it for reference, which is why some of the pieces in the above picture aren't exactly in the right place.

This is a photo of the finished Harris Tweed painting. Although this is a very small picture at only 23.5 cm square, it has still taken me about 25 hours to finish it for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the white tweed I've used was woven specially to make a wedding dress and so it's a bit finer than most of the Harris Tweeds I work with. This means it's also a lot more prone to fraying as a result of being needle felted. So I've had to be really gentle with it and go carefully. Secondly, my design turned out to be extremely complicated to make up as it was very fiddly to cut, fit and felt so many small and delicate pieces of tweed together. Never mind, it's good to give yourself a challenge. Now that it's finished it will be sent off to the printer to be electronically scanned and I'll get a print proof back and an electronic image, which will then get sent off to the greeting card printers.