A couple weeks ago someone asked if I could paint a 4′ X 4′ quilt on a piece of plywood to hang on their barn. Not what I usually do, but I’m always up for a challenge and I figured this would be pretty straightforward. We worked out a deal, and I started on the piece last week.
My first task was to paint the entire board, front and back, several coats of the background color, cream. That’s probably the easiest part of the whole exercise. Kind of like painting a barn. When that looked smooth I begged some help from a true quilter, master fine art quilter, that is, Caryl Fallert, one of my neighbors and a good friend. I needed the use of her overhead projector to get my 5″ X 5″ picture of the quilt to the 4′ X 4′ size I needed. She converted the file to grayscale using some Photoshop magic, and after printing it out on acetate we went to work aligning the image to fit with my panel. A couple hours later I had my outline complete and was ready to start the actual process of painting.
So far, I’ve completed the vine that coils around the border, a meandering undulating cord with loopy leaves and tulips and bud stems. The little isolated yellowish ovals you see are the centers of the roses that make up the middle of the quilt.
You can see more of the vine and tulip detail here:
Stay tuned while I add in rose medallions and fine tune.