Sunday, June 2, 2013

Wool brain

I had the awesome idea to make a picture of a brain, with the different areas done in different colors of yarn. So I go where I normally go for images to work from...Google search images.
My favorite was this one:

Source here

The more I thought about it the more I realized that maybe I was making the project to complicated for the medium of needle felting. I wanted to make a yarn brain, but the multiple colors might not make sense without a lot of detail. So I went on a hunt for brain colored wool in my stash. (OK I know that brains are not pink until exposed to air, but I wanted a pink-ish brain.)

I quickly discovered that I had some yarn the color that I wanted, but it was too tightly plied and the grist was too small to make the cerebrum's folds at the scale that I wanted. So I pulled out three colors of wool, carded them together, and spun a thick and thin single. Perfect color, perfect thickness.


Here it is on the spindle with the hand-dyed yarn I used for the crevices of the cerebrum.


As with all art projects, you tend to go where the work takes you, that is half of the fun.


I ended up trying some things and ripping them out. The best thing about needle felting is that it is really easy to rip out the wool and to try again if the shape or scale is off. 

At first I was using some handspun for the cerebellum, but the color, shape and texture was off. I ended up ripping it out and using the same color of wool that I was using in the crevices of the cerebrum. I added some dark red to the bottom, to add more depth to the section, and put as many white branches as possible in this scale to make the Arbor vitae.


I also ended up redoing a lot of the posterior folds.


I put an outline around everything so that it would stand out. I left off the face portion, because doing faces is not where my talent lies.


I really like how it turned out. A brain made of yarn. Yarn Brain. Wool Brain. This is Your Brain on Wool.

And that is why I really wanted to finish it, to play with the title. Well that and we need more science based art. 
Which title is best?


1 comment:

  1. Hello Kay... I'd like to get you hooked up with "Wovember" with this project of yours. Your creation will be majorly oggled, and perhaps you will get a long of new viewers too? I don't know if you have heard about "Wovember" , now only three years old, but here goes ~~ Felix is the founder , and her blog post about Wovember is here : http://wovember.com/2013/10/27/the-wovember-wal/

    I am also going to flag your post down to her, personally, if you don't mind. :) xx

    ReplyDelete