New Mandala Quilt

You guys may remember my quilt Ring Around the Mole, completed earlier this year.  It's been hanging at the Hubbard Museum of the American West in a SAQA exhibit, and I was recently contacted by some people who wanted to commission a similar quilt, but with different animals.

Ring Around the Mole

I met with them and worked up a design they liked so I'm moving forwards.  It's the first time I've made a second quilt in the same vein as a prior one and I'm trying to track how the two compare. The design process took about as much time as before, only two of the animals (the armadillos and the deer) were the same as in my project, but I didn't have so much difficulty with Illustrator as I did last time.  Designing Ring Around the Mole was really my first foray into vector graphics and designing a quilt that way, so it helped this time around to be much more familiar with the software.

Here are three different colored versions of the new design.  The clients wanted their ranch logo in the middle and then cardinals, squirrels, rabbits, chocolate labs, armadillos, horses, longhorns, deer, catfish, great blue herons, crested caracaras, red-tailed hawks, and great horned owls.  If I've done my job correctly, you should see all of those below!  One thing that stood out to me this time was the bird feet.  My first quilt had all mammals, so there weren't any bird feet, but it was quite challenging to draw all the different bird feet for this one.

They liked the middle version of the coloring so I'll be using that as my starting spot for finding fabrics.  A lot of the precise colors will depend on what I find, and of course the colors will be much more vibrant and textured in fabric than in the drawings.  As before, I'm going to have to be careful to prevent it from getting too busy, but I think I'll be able to find a balance.  I'm excited to be starting something new, and it was fun to mock up a design for someone who I knew really liked my quilts.