Inspirational quilting

For a while I have been contemplating using people more in my quilts.  I felt inspired to capture the relationships between people and relationships between people and our planet.  It has taken a lot of courage to do this as I have always found painting people more of a challenge than any other subject.  There is something quite hard about capturing emotion and getting proportions right in the human form. 

So I have taken the plunge and jumped right in to paint my first "people" quilt.  The first part of the process was to find a photo of a woman and child interaction.  I found a picture of me and my brand new nephew that was just what I was after.  It tells a lovely story of the delight of my twin sister giving birth to such a lovely wee man and of the relief of her safety after a particularly difficult birth.

I put this photo onto adobe photoshop,  cropped the photo and then reduced the colours to 8 and converted the picture to black and white.  I have sketched for years so I found seeing the image in a less complex form far less intimidating. 

This picture gave me a better indication of where the highlighted areas are and the shading was.  I decided to base this work on a sketch I had done a while ago .  I began by doing a colour drawing in my sketchbook.  I tried to upload a photo of this but the computer would not let me do this.  The joys of technology!   I then transferred this on to cloth.  I chose to paint in sepia and do the pendant and skirt in colour. 

I left the hands till last as I think this is the trickiest part to do.  I was quite happy with the finished result.

Now for the quilting..........