Ashmead's Kernal

For my last quilt in the 2015 series I have continued to design and develop in Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 (which happily continues to work well under Windows 10). I was able to pick and photograph apples from the tree in my garden for this piece so it really does feel like it is completely my own home grown piece of work.

As the challenge for this piece is 'Reflection' I decided to play with the Reflection Effects in the software. There are so many variables to try that in the end I just rolled the dice until I came up with several pictures that I liked. Then I just chose my two favourites and added a Distortion Ripple Effect to the lower one. Examples below...

Reflection pattern

Reflection pattern with ripple

Reflection kaleidoscope

Reflection kaleidoscope with ripple

Once I had settled on the final two background pictures I superimposed my apples over them and I printed them out on TAP and ironed this onto white cotton. It is difficult to make the joins disappear and I used watercolour pencils to try and hide any small gaps. 

I applied Golden Soft Gel Medium with a small paintbrush and let it dry and then ironed on gold and silver foil. 

Finally I dusted lightly with some pearly and bronzey markal sticks.

The piece was then ironed onto felt with mistyfuse and quilted with YLI machine quilting cotton in Dusk.

It might interest you to know that I am not very good at visualising which is why I find PaintShop Pro so useful in the design process. Unless I have done something before I cannot imagine what it is going to look like so I do a lot of  'what if', trial and error and test pieces along the way to finalising my piece.

Final challenge for the year - Reflection

As we come to the close of our 3rd year's journey together, we can reflect on how far we have come. I think we can see how much we have developed since some of us started with the Carnival challenge. We have played with new techniques, adopted some, rejected others, and narrowed our focus.

This challenge will be made up of two parts: a quilt in our chosen series and  a written reflection on how Latitude has helped us to develop as artists. This doesn't have to be a long essay, but this is a good time to summarise our thoughts.

For the final quilt in the series - and it may be the final quilt we do together, we need to talk about that - we should include something that involves the idea of  the essence of our theme. I am always impressed  by Picasso's works on The bull. It is amazing how he distills the essence from a tonal drawing to a few curved lines. 

Consider the essential elements of your theme and show them in your work. It could be like this Picasso series of drawings, going minimalist. But if you prefer to show more detail instead of less, that is OK too. This is your opportunity to draw on the previous 3 quilts in your series and work on an aspect that you particularly like about your subject.

Sometimes we are a little alarmed at a challenge theme and can't choose an idea. Maybe it will be easier with more freedom, but maybe not!