Life painting and the sports pages

The sports-pages textile piece seems to be gaining momentum. The idea of outlines has been abandoned for this project, and I'm looking at how to use the full-colour figures.

The painting course had a session last week of life painting -

Three quick drawings with a twig, and a longer pose with ink

Coloured ink for a floor pose

which wasn't too unbearable, though my results (some not shown!) were clumsy to say the least. This week we brought in our own project - mine is to find a way of painting the "boyz&ballz". Without the previous classes, I wouldn't have dared tackle "people" shapes!

The first idea was to use an embroidery hoop to layer up white fabric, the image, clear plastic, and fabric, and then to copy the image - trace it, with paint - onto the fabric. Fortunately the boxes of brushes yielded one small brush; I also use palette knives -

In progress; the fabric is cream net, almost invisible

He's done

 Unfortunately when the net was peeled away from the clear layer (cellophane, rather than plastic), a lot of the paint stayed on the plastic rather than staying on the net.

Next I used thin silk; the acrylic paint soaks in well -

Oh dear, that beard...

At home, I  haven't yet had time to get out the paints, but had a happy hour playing with ways of gluing the newspaper figures to fabric; this means that opaque fabrics can be used for the background. Net was another possibility, with the net around the figure being caught in the eventual quilting.

The first attempts -

Gluing (pva) was done on proper plastic, so that it would peel off easily. And a hair dryer was used to speed up the drying. From bottom left: when covered with glue the paper stretches and buckles. On net, sloppy application of glue leaves shiny bits here and there - but small figures do stick well. Applying glue only to the figure makes for neater net. On linen, figures stick well; glue can be applied before the figure is cut out.

From a bag of green scraps - turf. Looks good on individual pieces, but will it work on the big piece, which will be a metre long? (These figures are less than 20cm high.)

How will the newspaper stand up to the quilting process?

Or would it be better to get back to painting? Experimentation continues...