Painting a palette

I've been doing more fabric painting this week, preparing the palette for my next quilt. The problem was, I designed the quilt, and had a very firm idea of what I wanted - then had to find it. (I have this problem often - not just with quilting, but clothes, accessories, gifts, homewares...) Ultimately, I couldn't find anything suitable for the cherry-coloured sunset print in my design.

Luckily I have been empowered by my workshop with Lisa Walton and the Mickey Lawler Skydyes book and DVD to paint and overpaint fabrics.

First up I tried overpainting a rather ugly sunset in yellows and browns. Unfortunately I didn't take any photos before overpainting the whole 2m, and can't find any images online, but the photo above is how it ended up - nice enough, but too brown for my wishes. Later on I used some extra blue paint left from painting the two skies and added to the top half of the piece above - better but still not what I needed. I'll use it for something else another time.

 

So I started with plain white fabric and tried to create my own. I needed about 1.8m, so cut four, 50cm lengths, which are easier to work with - and fit on my covered foam boards. Above and below are two of these; they varied quite a bit, but all are similar enough to work when cut into the pieces I need. I'm really pleased with the results.

I used a plum, mulberry, grape and grevillea Sun Paints, with a little gold shimmer or sun pearl mixed in or painted over the top in places. I also used a deep burgundy 'daquan' Opulence paint mixed in in places. The closer view below shows the shimmer and sparkle

Below is the palette for my new quilt; the top four are commercial prints, and the lower three are my own hand painted fabrics:

When I was finished painting the blue skies I still had some paint left, so as well as a second go at the originally yellow sunset, I also tried overpainting a piece of the pinky sunset fabric in the palette, which I'll probably end up using in one of my beach scene quilts:

Such possibilities!