Hi, the content I'm bringing today is about a new painting I did in the backyard of my house. I made it recently in May and I’m super excited to show it here to you. I have these strong cross-stitch flower references in my background, in my repertoire. First, because the women in my family have always embroidered, so I’ve always had contact with this type of embroidery, right, cross-stitch embroidery. I’ve always thought it was beautiful and I often say it's my favorite kind of embroidery. There's a framed picture of a rose in cross-stitch in my living room that I found on a trip and it’s absolutely my treasure. It was inspired by that picture and by these ancestral stories from the women in my family and also by references I’ve seen of this type of embroidery adapted into urban settings. Whether through paint, like I did, or as actual reproductions like giant embroideries on fences or even on building façades, I wanted to mix all of this and paint a large rose in my backyard.
The thing is I had never done anything like this before so I only had, as we say around here, a dream because I didn’t really know what I was doing. But to guide myself I chose a picture of a cross-stitch rose on Pinterest and used it as a grid, as a reference image. To make sure everything worked out, I drew a grid on the wall using school chalk. The thing is I didn’t really have a big ruler to draw that grid. I only had a 30-centimeter ruler. This made the drawing process pretty chaotic, time-consuming and painful for my arms, but even so, it ended up working.
At one point I realized the lines of my grid were getting completely crooked and I was really afraid this would affect the final result of the rose. But since it wasn’t a drawing that needed a completely straight horizon line or anything like that, it could have a more free position, that didn’t end up being a problem. Even with that fear, I decided to take the risk because if it went wrong, in the end I could always just paint the wall again.
I’ll go ahead and apologize for the quality of these first photos. Since I was painting the wall, I couldn’t stop to take pictures all the time. So I left my phone recording a timelapse video and later captured some frames from it. As usual, the quality isn’t great, but it’s enough to show how the process went.
After finishing the entire chalk grid, I started drawing the rose. To do that, I marked Xs with chalk in different colors based on the reference image. One strategy I used to make things easier was to first draw the X with chalk and then fill it in with the corresponding paint color. Every time I changed colors, I’d mark the new Xs before painting. I did it this way to keep myself from getting lost, since each square was only four centimeters wide.
In total, I used seven colors, all of them regular wall paints that I already had left over from previous projects. I needed to use up those paints somehow, and I thought this was a great way to put those colors to use here.
The day was already getting dark, and I was really tired, so I decided to stop on the first night and continued the next morning until I finished all the roses and the leaves as well.
Another trick that helped me deal with the slightly crooked grid at the beginning was placing the Xs very close together, ending one X exactly where the next one started. That way, it gave the impression that the rose was "stitched" properly.
After the drawing was finished, I just had to erase the chalk grid using a damp cloth. One of the coolest things is that it ended up perfectly aligned with the window in my kitchen. So now, this rose has become the view I see when I’m doing the dishes.
And this was the result. It took me almost an entire afternoon, and I think it turned out beautiful. I didn’t expect it to look this good — it really exceeded my expectations. I’m already thinking about doing more paintings in this style. Let me know what you think. Bye!
