Thread painted portrait.

My little man is almost finished, its taken about 11 hours of stitching so far.

I was asked recently, "you seem to like older faces with wrinkles, can you create a child"

Well, I've given it a go and I'm quite pleased with it really.

I chose this little boy because of the angle of the image. It gives him a more dimensional look.

Its going into a quilt.

The quilt is a wholecloth illustration so imagine how difficult it would be to get a piece like this to sit flat in a wholecloth quilt if I actually did it on the piece.

So this little boy is done as a seperate quilt, yes, it has batting and backing already and I added a border of the fabric that the rest of the quilt is on.

The borders become part of the picture and will be quilted onto the wholecloth giving a gentle transition.

I haven't finished him yet, I have to do the rest of his hair which has been drawn onto the border.

The blue of his sweater will flow like a watercolor down into the main quilt and the small boy has his eyes fixed on a point to be revealed.

I shared the eye, that I drew the other day. I mentioned that drawing the eye is wonderful practice for converting from pencil to thread.

In my mind, I was refering back to the drawing remembering how I did the white shadow on the skin with pencil…. I can' do that with thread, well not in such detail, but the actual practice of doing it on paper has made it easier to do on a quilt.

There are lots of new techniques in this quilt and they are all written down for future classes.