Painting Play Day

All work and no play....well, you know the saying!

Yes, yesterday was Labor Day and most folks had the day off -- well, I decided to work some yesterday and finished the Island Quilters Guild's raffle quilt so I could take today off to be with Son #2...he works shift work and today was his day off. We'd been hoping to get together and try our hand at painting the quilted fabric I did several weeks ago.

That's the raffle quilt on the longarm behind our art table. Just wanted to prove to everyone that I really did finish my work before I took time off to play. And as you can see, Pixxie is still working hard at being my Professional Quilt Model. She is tireless, doesn't matter what time of the day a quilt is hung, she's ready, willing, and able to do her part in the online show and tell.


By the way, if you want tickets, email me for my address and send a SASE with a check made out to the guild....details when you email... karen @ quiltsnkaboodle.com

Okay, back to our play day...
This is as close as I could get to Son #2's attempt at painting his piece ( on the right hiding behind the pink soap). He did not like the way it turned out and since he doesn't live here any more he couldn't threaten to run away...but he did say he'd be really mad if I posted a photo of what he did...

This was the rejected one. I had quilted two of his art design, he started to paint in the purple with acrylics plus textile medium and didn't like it so went to the second one and did it in the fabric markers. My friend Trish came over for a little while so she played with us too. She tried her hand at the colored pencils on the leaves (bottom ones), didn't like it, and switched to good old fashioned crayons...this is as far as she got before she had to leave for another appointment. She voted for the crayons.


Now remember, we were just playing and trying to see what medium we thought we liked best, and to see how the colors played together.


I started out by painting the pink rosettes in the corner (not pictured) and quickly found that the acrylic wasn't going to do very good at layering, so I switched and worked in the star and did some wet blending to get the shadowing effect I wanted. I quickly found out that paint on a brush wasn't easy to use on poofy quilted fabric. So I switched to the markers... in the photo above I'm laying in my shading.


Here's the same feather plume finished...and the green design is also done with the markers.

Then I decided to play with the crayons. I did the bottom pink one. I liked the control I had on the shading, but seems so pastel. I guess I could color harder but I was ready to move on to try the colored pencils in the blue and green feathers.

Here's another shot showing two that were done with markers. I found that I couldn't wet or dry blend very well so figured I wasnt' going to use the yellow highlight in any future project. The light feather in peach is done with colored pencil.


And here we see my whole experiment, including those nasty corner pieces. My favorite look is the star in the center with the acrylic plus textile medium, but it's stiff and up close it's not all that great. My next favorite is the feathers done in the fabric markers. I think I can go back in and layer some to achieve a softer look, but quite frankly I'm ready to move on to a different practice piece.


I do want to try my hand at this again and do something "real" but I have to say, I'd rather be quilting than coloring. I'm disappointed as I thought this was going to be my next new thing.....Had visions of Son #2 designing his original art, me quilting it, perhaps having folks ask for patterns....okay, so I was dreaming....but it was a nice dream.

Time to get back to work! It was a great play day, and I loved spending it with my son.