DeLane’s “Four Pieces Project”

WARNING: DeLane, if you are reading this, go away! Spoiler Alert!

Tomorrow is the July meeting of the Pandoras (a group of four fiber artists dedicated to thinking and working outside of the box), and our annual dye party. It is always a blast. It is also the unveiling of DeLane's Four Pieces Project. For this group project, we each selected a photo, enlarged it to 16x24", and cut it into four pieces. You could cut horizontally, vertically, or any which way, as long as all the pieces were about the same number of square inches.

Then each person in the group gets a section. We were to recreate it at the same size, using any technique we wanted. The only rules were:

1. You had to use colors fairly close to those in the photo (no purple grass, for instance).
2. You had to use techniques or materials that would challenge you, or that you had not used before. It's that thinking-outside-of-the-box thing.
3. You could threadpaint past the edges of the photo, but you couldn't quilt past them. This was so that the owner could stitch all the pieces back together to create a cohesive image at the end.
4. You had to come to the meeting prepared to share your work, and talk about what you enjoyed (and hated) about the process of making it.

My photo was one I took in New Hampshire, a closeup shot of ferns. I got three of my four pieces back a few months ago (one of our members has had family issues that have not permitted her to finish some of the group projects lately). When I have all four pieces, I'll post a photo of them. It was so interesting to see how each Pandora recreated her section in a completely unique way. And they still looked so great together.

DeLane's photo features a statue of a pig in her springtime garden. Here's the section of the photo I was assigned. The whitish bit on the left is the start of the pig's rump:



And here is my section, which I made by drawing with water soluable wax pastels (and then wetting them to get a water-color look), then defining details with black thread and permanent Sharpie markers:



It's funny how photographic it looks now that it is done. I didn't do the darks as dark as in the photo, but I rather liked how it came out. One of the challenges I set myself was doing the thread work only in black. It gives it a harsh, graphic quality I like.