Pear with Apple

Another in my still life series.  The pear was lonely, so along came the apple.

To Kentucky and back...

I spent the last week and a half in Kentucky with a group of my fiber art friends.  We talked, laughed, relaxed, took in the beautiful quilts at the National Quilt Museum and even got a bit of work done ourselves.

 As far as what I got done, I did yet another still life.

 I am quite pleased with this pear.  The pretty light yellows, yellow-green, and salmon pinks show up nicely against the blue-green ground and blue violet background.  Even better, I was able to do this completely out of leftover strips I had.  I also had some beautiful dark colored blacks for the shadows.  :)

Life is just a bowl of eggs?

Oh maybe that's life is just a bowl of cherries?  Well I didn't have any cherries.  So after several days of working I "finished" the eggs.  I say finished in quotation as I will probably go back and make little tweaks here and there before I frame it, I always do.  But for now...

Working the eggs in "whites" against the really dark "blacks" really kept my interest in this piece.  And then to have the pop of color, the beautiful blue-green well it was the icing on the cake.  No, strike that, the hollandaise sauce on the eggs.

The eggs are progressing

I was able to get a bit more done on the bowl of eggs.  The bowl itself is quite interesting.  The bottom of the bowl is very dark due to the shadows cast by the eggs, but they are not black.  There is a lot of color in there.  I used various very very dark colors, you might call them colored blacks.  The rim of the bowl has some lighter color in bands.  Just below the rim there are drips of glaze in some beautiful blue-greens. I still have a ways to go... I must say this has been a very interesting piece to work on.

Let's get Crackin'...

So, this morning I sketched up my bowl of eggs, transferred the pattern to linen, got my palette "organized" and hooked some eggs.  Whew.

Here's the pictures of my progression.

 Sketch

 

"Organized" palette

AND...

Eggs!

It's been a while....still playing with still life

Life sometimes just gets in the way with this and that.  I've been busy but I can't really say that anything tangible has come from my efforts.  Today, however, I was able to work on a new design idea.  After I completed "Coffee, Black with Sugar Please" I was really happy and intrigued with shaded whites.  So I thought, I would try setting up a still life with eggs.  Today I tried arranging eggs in a bowl and viewing it from above and close in.
After adjusting lighting and arranging the eggs and taking many photos I decided upon this photo.

I then imported the photo into photoshop.  I love this software.  By use of it I can boost color, saturation, contrast etc.  I also love the posterization feature which helps to exaggerate the values.  This is very useful when I am doing the actual hooking of the piece. 

This is the photo after I have manipulated it and is what I will work from.

Now, on to sketching the design, transferring it to the linen backing and actually get it hooked.

A real still life challenge

In the past week I've struggled with my latest still life composition.  It wasn't the apple, but the "simple" spoon I put alongside the apple that became my nemesis.  I've decided silverware is NOT simple to translate into hooking.  I'm glad I didn't try a fork, thinking about getting the tines right makes me shiver.  I'm still not completely happy with the spoon, so it will get tweeked a bit more.  I actually already have tweeked it 5 times! This truly was a challenge.