Quilt Named and More Sketching

I asked for suggestions for naming the quilt I completed last week and received many ideas. I particularly liked the suggestion of Branching Out from my friend Carol Larson. Capturing the obvious (a tree branch) and the allusion to my trying something new with the quilting hit the spot for me.

The on-line class I’m taking with Jane LaFazio is coming to a close. The final lesson — Collage as a background for your page — was given last week, but we have until August 15 to upload more work and receive feedback from Jane and fellow students. I chose to collage a city map of Portland, one of my favorite cities to play tourist in.

The wine glass, rose and camera were sketched, painted inside the black line with absorbent ground, and finally painted with watercolor. The sun glasses were sketched and painted directly on the map. I wanted the lettering for “Portland” and “City of Roses” to be clear and handsome so I browsed my options on the computer, selected fonts, sized them, printed them out and traced them with permanent pen on artist tissue paper. They are applied with soft gel medium.

After reading one of Jane’s tutorials, I was eager to try my hand at using the absorbent ground in a new way. Here is the journal page with absorbent ground applied over a stencil then given a color wash using a one-inch brush. The stencil was a gift from my friend Anne (purchased from The Crafter’s Workshop) because she knows my penchant for ginkgo leaves.

Many layers of painting later, here is the final page.

I like the texture and ghostly imaging achieved by stenciling the absorbent ground.

Here is another page using a collection of pod stencils, ready for work. I’ve taken this photograph at an angle to better see the absorbent ground on the paper.

This is actually the other side of the page I completed above. I’m eager to get started on this one!

You can see what I did for all of the lessons with Jane — this year and last year — by clicking on the Sketch/Watercolor category in the right-hand column.