A Little Green Witch

I'm starting to show the steps I used in the making of the art quilt shown to the right. The little green witch is the centerpiece of it, so I'll begin with her.













I had this photo of a little girl dressed up for Halloween as a green witch.  She's got a scary expression, a broom to fly on, and of course a pumpkin for her candy. 




My first step was to trace the outlines of the major features and key lines on a piece of paper.

You see that here, with some preliminary design ideas. I used the line drawing to enlarge the design to full size. The full size enlargement became my pattern for the face, hat, dress, broom, etc. 

I traced the outline of the parts on fabric and then cut the fabric pieces out. The fabric pieces were all painted to give them a three dimensional appearance. 

For the face and hands I traced the outline on to white cotton fabric and painted the skin tones. The skin tones were green this time, a first for me! Below you see the face painting in progress:

These are the Tsukeniko inks I used to create the green skin color:

The hair was also painted. I used Tsukeniko inks and Derwent Inktense pencils for the hair color. I made her hair color a little lighter than in the photograph so that it would be more visible against the black hat. 

In my next post I'll talk about the hat and dress. Thanks for visiting my blog!

And now for the jeans...

This little cutie has on some hippie style jeans - decorations on the side seam and lower edge, and a cute tied belt. I have some blue jean fabric that has flowers in the design and thought it would be perfect for those jeans. Here you see it with my first idea for a tied belt.



I love the fabric for these jeans, and the pink belt would have been cute, but I already knew the background color I was going to use was a brown, and I wanted something that would work with brown better. So I ended up using this blue fabric. This started as a white fabric that had brown embroidery in it. I used textile paints and made it blue. It's been in my stash for quite some time waiting for the right art quilt to come along.



I wanted the creases on the jeans to be visible, so I used a white Inktense pencil to make them stand out more.





Here's what it looks like all put together:


I'll talk about the background in my next posts. Thanks for visiting my blog!

Moon Shadows - Using Derwent Intense Pencils

As I have described before on this blog, I used oil paint sticks for the majority of the painting on this piece. But, for the owl and the rabbits I used a white Derwent Inktense pencil. These are my pencils.

I switched to the Inktense pencil because I thought the large size of the oil paint stick would not fill the smaller area that the owl and rabbit shapes took up. The pencil point also gave me more control for the tighter curves and crevices on these animals.

To apply the Inktense pencil I poured a small amount of liquid painting medium on a dish, swirled the pencil in the medium and then stroked the pencil on the fabric. The medium I used is shown here:

I stroked in the direction that the moonlight illuminate the area of the animal to give it shape. I added more of the white pencil to those areas that are closer to the moon or that had more girth. Here is a photo of me applying the pencil:  

I let the pencil/paint dry and then pressed the area to set it.

It’s was as simple as that!

 Here are finished animals. Thanks for visiting my blog!