more meadow

working on the facing now, almost done.
wanted to talk some more about working from photos today.
It's all about what you put into your work - the quality of the photos is immaterial, as long as you can interpret them with feeling.  In fact, I prefer pictures that have lots of room for improvement- if it's a perfect photograph it can be left as is.

 here's the original sky pic, taken from my front door.

 the truly awful deer pic got printed out on regular paper......I blocked out the basic lines with a sharpie, then inked over it all to create them from fabric.

it's hard to see, but this is a working sketch.  The basic layout is sewn together and partly quilted.
I laid in more elements with colored pencil- the trees on the left, pines on the right, and rivulet in the center.  When I had dinner at Florence's house in Grand Forks, she had a dried up streamlet across the road, and she and her husband made a hobby of feeding the deer vegetable scraps from the local grocery store.  Well, we didn't see any deer that night, but I put them in from another place as well as a trickle of water from another time.  Thanks for the wonderful supper Florence, this one's for you!