Chapter 2 - Challenge 1

I am very new to blogging (can you tell!) so I am having trouble making the page read sensibly from one posting to another. This is why I have changed the title to "Chapter 2 - Challenge 1" as I intend to work another piece under the second Challenge/Chapter (Oh dear! see what I mean). However, this piece is Water Lilly that represents the first part of the Challenge. The brief was to create flowers on a pieced green background using three or more green fabrics, using whatever technique suited, to then use a repetition of one to three shapes and add a shape of colour off centre to create a focal point. Reading the second chapter of The Artist's Muse, the various artists talk quite a bit about wet-on-wet underpainting - in fact one of the challenges in the book is to create painted flowers using this technique with paper of course, not fabric. I thought I would have a go on fabric, just to see if the paint would run nicely like I imagined..... did it? Nah! I have used it in my piece though, and I painted the water lillies onto this painted green background using acrylic paints. I've machine quilted the piece using a bronze metallic thread, and embellished a little with bronze beads that I hoped might look like droplets of water on the lilly pads! All the fabrics used are cotton. Water Lilly is A5 size - which is the size I will make all my challenge pieces (approx. 5" x 8" plus a half inch here and there!)

The small picture above left is the inspiration I used for my piece, cut from a gardening magazine.