A Design Week

I am heading off to New York to run in the NYC marathon on Sunday. It is the start of some 'in again, out again' traveling for me for the next few weeks. As a result, I have been finishing up some existing projects and shifting my attention towards projects that I can take up when my life settles down a bit again. I picked a couple of photos that I've taken recently and wanted to explore as possible art quilts.

One is the fall leaf photo I posted last week. First I turned it into a grayscale image.

Next I reduced it to some simple shapes on tracing paper.

A trip later this month will take me to Seattle where I am looking forward to visiting Undercover Quilts again. They have an incredible selection of batiks and I can search for some possible fabrics if I decide to go further with this piece.

I also started playing with the clematis I had photographed earlier this year.  I turned it into a grayscale as well and removed the background in Photoshop.

After tracing onto paper, I broke the flower up into value variations. I am fairly sure that this will be one of my next projects when I am back at my machine as I can draw upon my stash for the necessary hues.

Photoshop is great fun for playing with images. Even though I have some batik in my stash that I think will work perfectly for the background, I experimented with different effects for the background. This was one of my favorites.