Art Quilt-Spring Tulips. I have been waiting patiently for my tulips to bloom outside my front door. It was taking too long so I decided to just paint some. When I first started painting on fabric many moons ago most of my subject matter was flowers. In fact, one of my art quilts at that time was tulips on point with a big bouquet in the middle block. A woman moving from Minnesota to Washington state tulip country bought it. Later on, my son Nickolas, who lived in Seattle took me to the tulip festival in Skagit Valley. That was very cool.

I used my usual process of drawing the design onto the cotton fabric. My goal with this art quilt was to test out my new Derwent inktense pencils. They are advertised to be permanent on fabric when dry. The pink flower in this picture was colored in with one of the pencils. Yes, it was permanent when I heat set it. Not sure about these pencils. I will talk more about the inktense watercolor pencils in another blog post. These leaves were my tester ones for the rest of the art quilt project. I like to use a lot of different colors in the leaves to add depth and color. I think there are 5 different colors of green to create the variations you see here.

Next, I blocked in seven tulips across the fabric. I knew I would go back and highlight each one later. It is usually a good idea to stick to uneven numbers in your design. Just like floral arrangements 1,3,5,7 are more pleasing to the eye. Eventually I painted in 9 tulips to balance everything out. While I was painting the leaves I was careful not to fill in with color too much. I wanted this art piece to be open and airy. That is why I didn’t paint in the sky and ground. Just the tulips.

In this picture you will see how it is highlighted with the black pen. Those little black dots in the middle of flowers gave it just a touch of whimsy.

It was pretty easy quilting and I choose to use my regular machine instead of the Tiara 3 quilting machine I usually use.

I loved how the quilting developed. This is the hardest part for me. How much quilting to do without taking away from the painting. The straight lines at the bottom of this piece and the leaf shapes at the top gave it the connectivity I was looking for, still creating that open feeling.

Happy Spring everyone!