A Little About My Fiber Art: I love being in the outdoors and illustrating all the beauty it has to offer. I also love to work with fiber, so it's a natural for me to combine the work of nature illustrating with the work of making fiber art pieces. These pieces often become my drawing surfaces. I begin with a base of cotton fabric. Then, illustrating on other pieces of cotton fabric with any number of things like graphite, acrylic paints, inks, rust and water-soluble colored pencil, I create individual elements that I apply to my cotton base - leaves, birds etc. combine on the fabric surface in pleasing ways to help tell my tale. I love to add other fibers, fabrics and even bits and pieces from the outdoors. Organza, silks, wool, reclaimed fabrics and objects, paper, grasses, twigs or shells all might find their way into my work as I tell a story.
Often the image I've drawn leads my work in new and exciting directions that I didn't expect, to tell a story I didn't entirely expect. At times I use natural plant-based dyes, made from tea, turmeric, wild nettles, common tansy and garden variety marigolds, which color is anything but common or garden variety!
Each piece I make is unique, and very tactile and visually complex. I enjoy telling stories within stories, often with humor.
A Little About My Illustration: My drawings and paintings are done on archival materials, with longevity in mind when they are offered for sale as originals. I use graphite, colored pencil (including water- soluble colored pencil), acrylic inks, black "India" inks, and acrylic paint on various surfaces: illustration board, watercolor paper, Stonehenge and Canson Mi Tientes, and Yupo polypropylene "paper". I most commonly work in artist-grade colored pencil and I often work with my own photos as a starting point.
My works shown are originals and not art prints, however any original piece can be made available as a fine art print or another product (iPhone cases, pillows, shower curtains, etc.), ordered through Fine Art America. If there's an image you'd like to purchase as a fine art print on this site and it's not currently posted in my profile on Fine Art America, contact me and I'll post it there so you can purchase that way. To explore the possibilities, you can follow this link to fineartamerica.com/artists/gina+gahagan
Here are a few snippets of some of my works. Some of these are photos taken while the work was in-progress and some are close-up detail shots. You can see the description of each piece, within its own gallery, to tie these snippets to the final works: