A Winter Seat

It's a beautiful snowy day here in Michigan. While I'm enjoying the view from my new studio space, there is nothing particularly remarkable. Out on the deck, the snow made a pretty little mound on my iron chairs and I snapped a photo to capture that. But you can see that the background is less than pleasing. In order to create art from this view, here's what I did.

First I turned off the color, resulting in black and white photo. Then I ramped up the contrast on the photo to highlight the important parts. Using the bucket feature Paint.net (a free program), I easily erased the lines I didn't want to appear in the final artwork. I just replaced them with white.

Next, I printed the photo out on watercolor paper I'd prepared with Golden digital ground. I used the digital ground to keep the inkjet ink from running when I painted it. I painted the printed image with watercolors and threadsketched the lines with black thread on the sewing machine. That's the third photo. Finally, I scanned the watercolor painting and printed it out on commercial inkjet prepared fabric. Then I used some textile paints to bump the color back up on the fabric version.

I added batting behind the little fabric piece (8x10) and threadsketched again with black thread to turn it into a quilt. Now I'm working on adding some fun embroidery with simple stitches. I may add some beads. When I'm done, I'll finish the edges and have a small quilt to remind me of this brilliant day in January and the winter seat full of fluffy snow.