WEEKLY ART PROJECT #41; SPRING ARRIVES

 My son's birthday often heralds the arrival of the first daffodil of Spring to my garden.  Sure enough, last week, a beautiful ray of sunshine opened up into bloom, gently bobbing on it's slender stem.  However, on Saturday morning, a storm was well & truly brewing.  Warm wind gusted in, rattling the branches & whipping up havoc throughout the garden. In the process that nasty wind knocked my poor daffodil to the ground, so I had to rescue it & put it in a vase.

Naturally, it is my muse for the weekly art project.

This was the photo that I knew I wanted to work from, but before heading to the studio to begin exploring design options, I went back outside...

... to photograph the strappy leaves & budded stems that are still insitu.  With these sources then printed off, it was time to get to work.

This week I decided to change my usual pattern of behaviour & instead of black pen studies, I got the felt pens out!  Drawing directly with colour in a variety of nib widths & often colour tones different to what the pen lid indicates, creates a different style of study!  I was heading for a simplified interpretation of my daffodil.

Having found a design direction that I wanted to pursue, it was time to see what fabrics  I had in my stash.  I also found a button & some beads, which I hoped would provide an interesting centre to my daffodil.

The background was where I started.  I wanted to reference the strappy leaves with their tendency to twist at the top.  Using a contrasting colour thread to sew the design in, I began.

I didn't cut back the background, because I had more sewing to do. On went the background petals.

And the final lot of sewing added a centre to the daffodil.
NOW it was time to cut back & this is how it went...

And then the finishing touches...

 I am quite pleased with the results.

Were I to do it again, I would probably forget about the length of the leaves & just repeat the 'twist' section to form a patterned background.  As for the daffodil flower, I like the irregularities that drawing something freehand produces & I'm pleased with the addition of the button & beads to the centre.

All in all, a fun little exercise to hail the arrival of Spring!