The sharing of creative ideas is one of Pinterest’s best features, and I’m a fan. I don’t visit or pin every day – but on a sunday morning I often find a bit of browsing+writing time, as I do today. And another thing about Pinterest is that one thing so easily just leads on to another, meaning you can spend hours just browsing around. Like any other artist, I am always interested in technical ideas to think about using in my own work.

I love hand stitchery, and the resurgence in popularity it has enjoyed in recent years as a highly flexible technique for fibre artists and mixed media makers. Scroll down my contemporary hand stitch board to find this image of a stitchery by Marisa Ramirez that I pinned a while back. While I don’t care for her colour scheme, I was intrigued by (1) that stitched, appliqued circular shape looks like firm plastic – do I like it? not really, but will remember it some time, probably. (2) the patterned segment at the bottom of the pic (to which my first response was ‘hand stitch’) was probably stencilled with red-brown paint with a thin masking tape resist. Whether I’m correct or not doesn’t matter – it’s the pattern and its potential that strike me most. To show why, I did this quick line sketch with jottings to show how I begin to explore possibilities:

From my lines and shapes board I selected this image of a beautiful set of ceramic pieces. Beside the image: “We design and make garden wall art made from ceramic. Our wall art is suitable for interiors and exteriors and handmade in Marbella, Spain. ” Absolutely. I could live with this, and have just the very wall! On their website www.gvega.com this and other customised wall sets are shown installed, and it is worth spending a little time looking at other parts of their website. I wish they were just down the road from here, as Marbella Spain is not on my travel list in the near future. However, having seen it, I’m sure I could take one of my own designs to a ceramic firm here in Montevideo. There are design elements in this that I have long used myself – wandering lines, inserts of pattern and texture, segmented shapes including arcs, and of course, glorious gold!

On another Pinterest board I post hole images I find. Holes have always intrigued me, and I once wrote: To every hole there is a foreground through which the viewer can see a background which might be up close, or stretch into the distance.  I know this is totally basic, but still something to think about. I love lace in its broadest sense; I wear several pairs of earrings and other jewellery with holes as the decorative element; and over many years I have made some art some works with holes revealing something behind :

So, to summarise, Pinterest is like that folder, scrapbook album, drawer or shoebox filled with bits cut from magazines and catalogues!! All creative people save such things, and today we can do it digitally. The financial and environmental cost of keeping up via paper magazines is huge if you must keep up that way. Today, however, we can sign up for digital editions of papers and magazines, google online catalogues where available, and instead of clipping paper we can save text and images in so many ways. Pinterest is a great way to gather visuals. Our computers range from desktop to our pocket-sized phones, many of which have cameras. On our actual phones or using laptops and desktops, we can put images through photo editing programs, some of those even within phones and cameras themselves. Of course, that barely approaches what those filters and lenses can produce in the hands of a skilled professional photographer.