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Tips and Help
I've put together some tips to help you create your landscape quilts. One of the most important things you can do to create a successful landscape is to invite your viewer into the picture. To this end, it is very important that you establish depth.
Creating Depth
We will start with a raw edge appliqué landscape. Forest scenes with whole cloth backgrounds are fairly simple to construct and the illusion of depth is achieved by finding a foliage print which blends in a bit with the background fabric. Messy cut several clumps of foliage, using the front and back of your fabrics for variety.
Messy cutting can be tricky. The best shapes are irregular with small cuts all over. Avoid making circles, ovals and rectangles. Don't make large 'blobs' with long curvy or straight lines, rather put your hand and scissors to work, cutting deeply into the fabric as you move it all around in your hand.
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Glue clumps of foliage and arrange tree trunks and branches where you'd like them. When everything is glued down, use a simple crayon to draw distant saplings.
You can draw them lightly at first, and then darken them once you like them.
The beauty of the using a crayon is that if you make a mistake, you can use sticky clear tape to lift the marks off the fabric!
Iron the saplings with an absorbent press cloth to make them permanent.
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You can draw as many saplings as you like. In this picture, you can see how I shaded the tree trunks. I used dye markers and pastels. Chalk pastels are easy to use! They too can be lifted off your quilt with tape. (Pastels need to be sprayed with a fixative to make them permanent.)
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Use an extra fine point Sharpie marker to darken one side of the drawn saplings. I shade them under the branches and on one side to give them added dimension.
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Spring Forest 44 x 31 inches
Birches 45 x 28.5 inches
In my quilt watercolor quilt "Birches", depth was created by both the receding tree trunks and foliage. The distant shrubbery is created using chalk pastels.
Look carefully at this close-up picture. The foreground shrubbery and background shrubbery are the same fabric. I used dark gray and green pastels to 'wash out' the red color and make it blend into the background tree trunk fabric. I also used the pastels to blend the dark background all over tree print into the light all over tree fabric at the top.
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Blending fabrics
If you are looking for a quick quilting fix, watercolor quilts are not for you. They take time to design and the process itself becomes as engrossing as a jigsaw puzzle. However, the finished results are tremendously satisfying! Let's start with something simple, flowers hanging over stone wall. I used four fabrics which I have in my store - at least for the time being...
I'm going to show you two lessons for the price of one! The yellow background fabric behind the pansies is bold, but remember that much of it will be hidden in the seam allowances. On the other hand, we can easily and quickly change that background color with a watercolor pencil. Just use a wet brush, dab the end of the pencil to pick up a bit of paint and color the background a lighter shade of green. See the difference?
Now, the Fabri-Quilt ivy has a background the same color and tone as the Northcott. So, blending from one into the other is easy. Because the pansies have a lighter value and are bright flowers, they lead the eye right up into the foliage and your brain blends one into the other.
Since fabrics like that perfect Fabri-Quilt ivy vine aren't always available, you could simply cut out and fuse the pansies over your pieced background. I'm a big fan of doing things this way!
Here is a little mock-up of a garden path. I used just these 3 fabrics. (Currently available in my store - while supplies last!)
To create the path, I used the front and back of each fabric. The scenic Michael Miller print is the backbone of this path. It has the blending elements needed to take us from the path into the garden. As the path narrows and becomes obscured by the foliage, the blending fabric used is the back side of the tiny leafy print by Troy. Blank Textiles provides the sunlit path fabric with a touch of green/blue and sandy areas.
Here is the large image of the path for you to study. Notice how all the colors and values blend from one into the other. I turned each square of fabric this way or that so the values of the fabrics flowed from one into the other. Also, notice the center of the path. There are 3 squares of the back side of the Miller fabric. It is important to add a variety of texture and interest whenever possible. Though you may think they stick out too much, look again at the small image. Once the quilt top is pieced together and quilted, those squares will be just fine.
Paths can be used to draw your viewers into forests, in which case the greenery on the edge of the path would blend into foliage prints with added tree trunks. This is what I did in Spring's Call. (See the Gallery). Conversely, the path could lead the viewer through a garden. Small floral prints of daisies, or red poppies could be built into a perennial border. Use more of the Michael Miller print and top off this garden with trees and sky.
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Creating 3 Dimensions
The use of fabric dye markers is becoming more and more widespread in the quilting community. Though many use them just to color a popped up bobbin thread, they are also extremely useful in shading objects to make them look 3 dimensional. Here are some close-up shots of trees or vases where dye markers have been used to created depth.
Notice the trees are all shaded on one side. I used a gray dye marker and a sharpie to give the trunks some texture. (The complete quilt is in my Gallery).
Here is a detail shot from Floral Vista again. Notice the deep shading on the left side of the vase, and the shading around the leaves at the base of the pedestal.
I hope you've found this page helpful and inspirational. Many of the fabrics and products I'm selling are to help you re-create these effects in your own masterpiece quilts. If you have another subject you'd like to see me explain, or if you have a question, just ask!
Cathy
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