Painted Quilt Blocks…

I am having a lot of fun doing these tiny quilt block paintings…it isn’t that I am getting wildly inspired by them – as in this leads to that, leads to next, leads to another...ideas flowing and growing…like some of these projects have done for me…but they are fun in a quiet, kind of meditative way…they are similar to Zentangles because they are ‘organized doodling’ - like Zentangling is. Also I am enjoying the extended play time with the watercolour pencils…a medium I have only just started to use…they are wonderful for this kind of thing…I have used them before to do the ‘wonder bubbles’ for “Sitting under Mandara’s Tree of Wonder”…for those circles I used normal coloured pencils (Prismacolor), watercolour pencils and then ink.

Here are the steps for making the quilt blocks…

Working from a picture…original painting by Gail de Marcken from the book ”The Quilt Maker’s Gift” – by Jeff Brumbeau…this is the Friendship Star quilt block...


















I drew the square masks on my stack of 25 little cards…


















I pencil in the pattern…ooops...I realized, after I scanned this and started with the watercolour pencils, that I missed penciling in 2 of the diagonal lines...


















Then, using the watercolour pencils, I decide on my colour scheme and colour it in…I am not trying to reproduce material patterns here like in the picture I am working from…


















Now comes the melting of the colour…using a wet paintbrush I work on each coloured section separately until I have ‘painted’ over the whole picture…


















Using ‘regular’ watercolours and a brush, I lay on the background colour…


















Finally, when it is all dry, I write the name of the quilt block with a black ink marker…


















If you notice a slight difference between the last 2 pictures...it is because, as I opened the black marker and told myself to be very careful in writing the name of the quilt block correctly...I very carefully left out the 'd' in 'Friendship'!!! I hate it when I do things like that!...so I cut out the quilt block and attached it to a different background with gel medium! You've got to love gel medium!!!