Hare Today

This week, I have been doing a free tutorial by Sophie Wheatley to needle felt a portrait of a hare.  I have tried making needle felted figures, with no great success but decided to try doing a portrait.  You had to purchase the supplies but Sophie kindly gave her tuition for free, supplying the reference photo and line drawing.

Step one was to transfer the image onto the fabric.  This was done by pouncing, where the line drawing was pierced and a dot transferred, creating a dot-to-dot style line drawing.

The first felting tutorial focused on creating the eye and adding the highlight to make the eye look glassy.

The next day focused on filling in the head shape, creating layers that would felt together and focusing on shapes within the form.  It’s largely the same process that I use when doing a pastel or pencil drawing.

Day three was all about the ears and learning directional felting, which created the lovely fur tufts in the ears.

The body was filled in the following day, again looking for shapes and shadows in the fur.

The final day was refining the portrait and ensuring it was well felted before adding fur details and the whiskers – they were particularly tricky.

This was such fun to learn and I’m keen to try my hand at another so I’ve joined Sophie’s Wild Fibres Art Club where there are loads of tutorials to have stab at - pun intended!