A fabric project

Each year the Town and Country Decorative Painters makes a painted quilt to support our annual retreat. The quilt always follows the theme of the retreat. The theme for the 2009 retreat is Painting Safari. Each square of the quilt is to be decorated with the likeness of a jungle critter. I was assigned a parrot. The design on my square is a Macaw. The retreat committee provides the fabric. This year there is a leaf design on the fabric. The square is painted using DecoArt So-Soft fabric paint. The parrot is painted as a vignette. That is, the edge just fades off rather than being a hard, finished edge or including the whole bird.

A difficult subject

A Visit to the Aquarium

5x7

colored pencil on Bristol Plate (smooth)

The challenge in this little piece is the aquarium lighting. Everything in the picture has a blue tint. To achieve this, after the little boy was completed, I applied a light wash of blue over him. The whale was rendered using various blue pencils in addition to the white and black so that it would have the blue glow that was in the photograph. See if you can find the lost edges on the whale.

When I am ready to frame this piece, I think I am going to mat it down to about 3.5x4 so that it will be eligible for submission to a miniature show.