Jill Thirza Cooper - Artist

Today, I'm highlighting some of my daughter's paintings. Jill Thirza Cooper lives in Chicago, IL with her family. She has a framing shop and art gallery called Forte Framing and Gallery. Jill is a design professional with an undergraduate degree in computer science and environmental design and a graduate degree in Architecture.

She has painted the Chicago skyline in various sizes and different times of the day and night. This past week, she posted the one below, on Facebook, and it sold. This one has a very colourful sky - a happy piece!

The swimming woman is my favorite. I saw it when I was in Chicago in April.



Most recent and just sold as well as a print of it.



Daisies and Dandelion

A few posts ago, I wrote about a piece of wall art that I had completed as a donation to the Cabot Quilt Guild for the Mother's Day weekend quilt show. It is part of a silent auction. Well, here is the completed piece. It is framed 8" x 10".

The sky is hand dyed satin (this fabric gives a lovely lustre to the sky). The green hills / grass are strips of commercial fabric that have been stitched with the sewing machine. The tree trunk and branches are thread painted and sewn onto the background. The foliage is stitched on by machine to give a 3-D affect. The daisies were hand stitched and then added to the picture (again, the flowers are in 3-D). The dandelions are French knots. Most of my landscapes have dandelions somewhere in them (unless they are winter scenes). When I was a child, I would pick these flowers as a present for my mother. She would accept them with a smile.

Latest Work

I just finished another piece of wall art. It's a donation for a silent auction later in May. At this time, I'm just showing a small corner of the piece. The 'rock' is silk that was printed from my computer. Refer HERE for information on printing onto fabric. The daisies were embroidered individually and hand stitched in place. The orange flowers are French knots. In the completed landscape there is a hand dyed sky, hills and a large tree with foliage. The skeleton tree was thread painted onto organza. Foliage was added after it was placed on the background.

Fabric Dyeing

Over the years, I have dyed fabrics for various projects. I started out using the Colour Vie Pigment System with Gunnel Hag. In fact, I still use it as it makes the most beautiful skies as you can see in this piece, 'In All Its Glory'.

For some reason, there are two photos of this piece showing up in Internet Explorer! I post in Fire Fox.

I have over dyed commercial fabric to get the right colour for a project. In the long piece, 'Western Brook Gorge', the binding fabric and some fabric used in the mountain range, were done this way. To get the texture I wanted for the mountain, dyed cheese cloth was used, as it is easy to crunch up to give the look of ridges.This sky was also dyed using the Colour Vie Pigment System mentioned above.

For other projects, I have used a variety of fabric paints, paint sticks, stamping inks, premixed fabric dyes, water colour pencils and crayons. I haven't used Ritz dyes yet. I came across a great tutorial on using these dyes that I just might try. It was posted by Vicki Miller, from Australia, called To Dye Another Day. Check it out.