I'm beginning to make progress again on my art quilt. I noticed that in the past twenty fours hours whenever I glanced or stared at my piece so far, I kept thinking about cutting it. I am not against cutting up a piece of my work in progress at all.....I've done it before, and the new pieces often give new ideas. I couldn't see clearly yet though how I would cut this piece, so first I went to the computer to play around with the photo I had taken of this quilt. I went to Photoshop and begin cropping sections so I could see if there were any ideas from cropping. I finally decided to crop out the large tree section, and that was appealing.
Then I begin to play around with various ways to alter the color......I altered the hue and saturation many ways, brightness and contrast, and even tried a few of the filters to change the appearance of the cropped tree section. I became excited now..........the changes I was seeing brought me focus and I arrived at the message for this quilt.
My art quilt would reflect the changes in the forest that would happen when artists above emptied their paints to earth......the forest would erupt in a splash of color. I'm thrilled that I have a focus.......and I love the idea. So, I got busy.
I altered the tree photo six different ways and transferred these new pictures to fabric........I used different fabrics as the surface for the transfer. I cut an 8 1/2 by 11 inch piece of the fabric, ironed it to the same size piece of freezer paper, which would allow me to run the fabric through the printer. Here are resulting images:
This is typical of how the image appears on fabric with my printer.
You can tell that some of the fabric has a print on them, some are plain. After I placed them on my design wall, I decided to improve the colors of the tree itself by coloring over them with my watercolor pencil. This resulted in the images being more pronounced as you can see in the following image.
Much more to my liking. What's next? More cutting? maybe. Will I use the original quilt in my piece? Maybe. Now I am excited though about the next step, whatever it will be, because now I have a theme, focus, and idea for my work. My working title is "Paintbrush Forest"........that may change of course, but here's where we are as of right now. Stay tuned!
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