Nature’s Beauty – New Art Quilt. 24″ X 30″ latest art project. Irises have been in each of my yards since 1972. I love every variety. My friends have been giving me a lot of new colors throughout the years. This summer I am redoing my garden area and will be moving these glorious flowers to pots for safe keeping. I thought I would paint an art quilt representing how I see these beautiful plants.

This art creation outline was made from pictures I had taken in my garden a few years back. One of the design concepts, I would like to practice, are things going back towards the horizon line. Larger flowers in the front and very small in the distance. It always fascinates me how the leaves twist and turn around each other. It took some time to get the weaving effect. After transferring the design to the fabric it was time to paint.

The watercolors colors on my pallet for this art quilt were, sour lemon, deep purple, brilliant red, and rose madder. You can see the white textile medium in one of the circles on my pallet. I realized right away that it would be very easy to get the flowers too dark at the beginning, so I added a lot of water to the first coats to get the lightness and then added dark highlights.

When I did my pen work it was fun adding the dots and line to the center of the flowers. I was very pleased with the unopened blooms.

The yellow iris represents the iris starts that my painted ladies gave me a couple of years ago.

Blocking in the feature flowers and then adding the leaves. I used about five different green and brown paint colors to get the variety.

Painting the background and creating the horizon line was one of the last things to be done with this art project. I must have changed my mind three or four times about where it was going to be. I really like where it appeared though.

This is when I realized that the perspective in the picture wasn’t quite right. All the iris flowers were grouped in the middle. That is when I created three small iris flowers to applique to the back of the field meeting the horizon line. My hubby suggested I should paint some small hills way back there on the horizon to add interest. So I did.

Perspective in an art quilt is always something that I continue to work at. My designs are a work in progress and most of the time I don’t know what the finished art quilt will look like. It keeps me very flexible as to where things should be at the end. The dark green leaves at the bottom were painted separately and then appliqued onto the quilt. To me, it grounded the whole design.

Using glide thread, makes those flowers sparkle and pop.

Hope this was informative and now I am working on a tiger lily design. We will see where that takes me!