I woke this morning thinking about a new art quilt – initially I thought I’d do one of Trinity NL showing the village, but the photos I took weren’t interesting enough to warrant the amount of work an art piece like this involves. Stupid me, I didn’t even think of taking a panorama photo of the ocean side of the lighthouse ridge although, fortunately I had three photos that overlapped (or nearly did) at the location where we stopped to watch humpback whales leisurely feeding.

I got up and looked at the photos, tweaked them a bit, printed them out, taped them together to create a composite image – the finished art quilt will end up about 34″ wide and about 8″ high – it’ll make a nice wall hanging. The focal point of the image will be a whale blowing at the surface. Right now I’ve got the whale centered – it’ll have to be moved to one side or the other and probably scaled down about 25%. Although humpback whales are large, what I have right now is a bit out of proportion with the panorama.

Next step, I pulled fabrics from my landscape stash in blues, greys (light, and dark, and with beige), greens (lots of different greens), and some black.

The challenge is the sky and sea – I briefly thought about printing the photos on fabric but my fabric sheets are 11″ x 8 1/2″ and there’s no way to make the joins invisible so I have to come up with a way of getting a continuous expanse of sky and water in the same colour family but distinct shades – the sky a pale blue at the horizon to darker at top of image, the sea with a dark foreground and lighter at the horizon. I’m thinking I will have to use some poly-cotton fabric which I paint with some kind of ink to get the effect I want. Once I have that problem worked out, the rest is relatively straightforward – although getting the vegetation to look real will be a challenge – I may actually print those elements on fabric then fuse and appliqué them in position. I’ll try piecing it, first.

So now I’m off to the fabric store for some poly-cotton to see what I can do to create sky/sea. It’ll be interesting to see how close I come to what I imagine.