Desert Sunset Series - Art Quilt

I recently gave a talk at a local fiber art group and pulled out all my art quilts to prepare for it. While doing this, I noticed that the name I gave the quilt shown below is "Desert Sunset I". Well I made this quilt about 3 or 4 years ago and so far there is no Desert Sunset II! So I think its high time I got on that.

Desert Sunset I

I made this quilt by first thread painting the design, and then using oil paint sticks on the stitched images on the black fabric. That is the technique I plan to use for the next in this series. 

I printed photographs I took in a recent trip to the Scottsdale area. I was on a golf course and loved the look of the desert homes, cacti, rolling hills, rabbits, etc. These are many of my photos, plus one from a copy right free site on the Internet of an owl.

My first thoughts were to make something with desert home structures on a hillside with cacti and rabbits. I traced the homes and rabbits and started arranging the traced images. I couldn't come up with something that really appealed to me, however. It needed something more.

On one of my trips to this area there were large owls perched in trees,  I thought they looked very cool.  I love birds, so I decided I wanted to include an owl on a tree branch.

Well, a tree branch requires a tree. So back to the drawing board. I pulled out photos of trees and came across some dead tree shapes I had taken from a trip to Bryce Canyon. I started to work on a sketch using those trees as inspiration, and came up with a tree shape I really liked. But, with the tree and owl, there just wasn't room for all the elements, so many of my starting ideas were dropped. They will have to wait for another in the series, I guess. Ultimately, this is what I came up with for my design:

There are no desert homes, but I do have a tree, bunnys, an owl, hills, a moon, clouds, rocks, and some desert plants. I am happy with this, even though it is far afield from what I originally had in mind. Next step is to enlarge the image to my finished size.

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