WIP Wednesday: Shadows on the Orchard

Since I finished the dog quilt (which did not, alas, get into the show I was rushing to finish it for), I've started designing another small art quilt for a SAQA New Mexico challenge.  But while I wait for some supplies to arrive for that, I've been spending some time working on the Orchard Quilt.  When last we saw it, I'd finished the quilting, and it only remained to put some shadows in on the trees.

I painted some shadows for the trees back at Asilomar when I first started the project, but later realized they went the wrong direction for the light source in the quilt.  I'm not a good drawer or painter, so decided to use Photoshop to get the shape and orientation of the shadows.  I took a picture of the quilt, resized so the picture dimensions matched the quilt dimensions and then created new layers containing each tree.  I was then able to transform the layers so they were the correct angle/direction/perspective for my light source.  I then printed out each of the layers and traced the outline onto freezer paper.  After carefully cutting out the tree outline with an exacto knife, I was able to iron the freezer paper stencil to the quilt surface.

I decided to use Shiva Paintstiks to fill in the stencil.  I did a practice tree first on a piece of scrap fabric and decided that a light mix of silver, blue, and purple with a tiny bit of black gave a good color.  I love the translucence and iridescence of the painstiks, not nearly as heavy as liquid paint.  I liked this approach for shadows and think I'll use it in future.  I actually think it might be fun to do some "shadow study" pieces;  the shadow on that big foreground tree was really cool and it made me sad that the vast majority of it went off the front of the quilt.

That tree on the left was supposed to look like it was on a snowbank (cream) behind the front tree (white), so I cut the shadow stencil apart and offset/shortened it since I felt like some of the shadow would be behind the hill where you wouldn't see it.  This is just about the last step on this quilt, I'm going to give the paintsticks a couple of days to set up and then iron them before I wet and block the whole thing in anticipation for facing/finishing.

Linking up as ever with Lee and Nina-Marie!  Hope you are all having a creative week!