Swirls seem to be a theme

These are "extracts" from some recent work at Barbara's, swirly warm up exercises to get our eye and hands and inner artists loosened up! Then we made the grid stencil, then I had homework to do with them, so this is part of my homework.

I used the grid stencil to isolate bits of each A3 image. Or, as right, to overlay the two A3 images and take from both. Blue is often my chosen colour, though the later image is in much warmer tones.

As I was doing the colour wheel exercises, which is another story, I splodged and splished the spare paint on spare paper (good advice from Barbara, don't wash it down the sink, use it to colour paper in some way), and came up with this, which I then used for the next part of the homework (I was meant to use a magazine).

Here's what happened.

I extracted some smaller areas from this image; again using the grid to bring out certain parts. There is much twisting and turning and moving about of the grid, to try and get the bits you want to see, fitted into its irregular shapes. I worked each little area up on some cartridge paper (did I mention I'd treated myself to some felt pens; recently?!)
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I coloured my extract first in it's own colours, then in their opposite, then made a collage of it with paper from magazines. I raided some old Quilting magazines for colours. The single tree motif is from the left hand side of the image. This is the one I decided to do the most with, but I also played with the foreground image, initially sketching it out (top left) to look at the tones, then working it up to extract its basic shapes and colours, again with the felt pen (loving 'em). This might also be fun to explore

It's an interesting exercise as it encourages you to think of the image as a series of simplified shapes, which is what you need for an embroidery design.
All rather illuminating!