Whisper Challenge

Have I really not posted since December? I was busy in Spring teaching an Excel class which I hadn't taught before. Went on a week and a half trip to Orlando and Disney World right after school let out. This summer I've been busy with a major garden project in the front yard. I did manage to get a quilt done last month, although I can't show more than a preview since it's a challenge project which can't be revealed yet.

It’s Whisper Challenge time again. Here is a small detail of how I began. The top is pieced together with overlapping edges held together with zigzag stitching. I drew the main design lines directly on the top with a permanent fabric marker. They are hardly visible now after I have added all of the layers of paint and quilting. The completed quilt won’t be revealed until after the challenge is complete in February 2013.

The 2011Whisper Challenge can now be viewed on the SAQA regional blog. My quilt “Figs for a Crow” is the seventh quilt in Group 5.

I never showed the finished quilt from the 2010 Whisper Challenge, although I showed a preview a couple years ago. I don’t think there is a slide show available of the whole challenge, but I do have a few photos from the beginning.

Here is the photo, which I started from. A small crab on a rocky beach.

Here it is my finished quilt. I zoomed in on the little crab, brightened the color scheme up, and added a few barnacles.

I love what Deb Cashatt came up with next. She manipulated the photo of my quilt in Photoshop, and came up with something totally unique.

Eddie's Rooster

“Luck blossomed from the first. A dusty Rhode Island red rooster who had wandered too far from his own farmyard crossed the road and Eddie hit him without running too far off the road.”

(John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, chapter 13)

In Steinbeck’s book, the chicken ended up in a pot of soup with “a sack of carrots which had fallen from a vegetable truck, half a dozen onions which had not.” I have put the truck far enough down the road to give him a second chance to leap out of the way.

Merry Christmas!

Working on Perspective

The perspective rules I had known about weren’t allowing the car to look like it was driving downhill. I learned yesterday to raise one of the vanishing points for slanting objects. The proportions seem off a little, but I think I won’t let it bother me in the interest of getting the painting done on time.

I will scale my drawing on the computer to fit the composition, and then trace it onto the watercolor paper to save the step of redrawing it again.

“And then Eddie driving, they backed up over the rise, over the top and turned and headed forward and down past Hatton Fields.”

(John Steinbeck, Cannery Row,chapter 13)

Lee Chong’s Model T

Our final project for watercolor class is supposed to be based on something we’ve read. I’ve chosen a passage from “Cannery Row.” This is a value study for part of the painting. I have been working on redrawing this truck so it has the correct perspective to fit in the final composition.

“The body of the car was so battered that its next owner cut it in two and added a little truck bed.”

(John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, chapter 11)

Completed Again

There were a couple things in this painting that were bothering me too much, so I made a couple of fixes. The middle line on large pot is now following the curve of the pot better. And I’ve darkened the shadow near the bottom behind the lavender vase.

Still Life Completed

My watercolor still life is completed. Looking at it smaller on the computer is a bit like stepping back to view the painting as a whole. I immediately saw a couple things that I would change if I were in love with the painting. Not being totally in love with this one, I am calling it done.

Classroom Still Life

We are all painting from this still life in my watercolor class. I didn’t like how the candlestick was dividing the composition in half, and hiding most of the grapes, so I scooted it over in my drawing. I need to darken the shadows, and add some detail to the large pot and the bottle. I’ve printed a greyscale copy of my painting, so I decide what to do with the background.