Here's what I'm working on now...

After all the responses from the last newsletter that I sent out, I decided that the next piece that I am going to work on is in honor of my father. He served aboard the USS Floyd B Parks in 1955-56. I think it will be a fitting tribute to create a piece of artwork of his ship. I think it is going to be a challenge though. There is quite a bit of detail to contend with.

In this series of posts I'm going to take you through the process of creating this piece.

Part One: Using the reference photo, I picked out a bunch of light grey and pale blue fabrics to represent the sky. I briefly considered going completely black and white, but decided it would make this a much too somber piece. So I decided on mostly grey with hints of blues. The third, fourth, and fifth fabrics from the left I decided not to use since they were a bit too dark for the sky. I want to have enough contrast between the sky and the ocean. I substituted some other light blue and gray fabrics instead. (Note: To anyone familiar with the USS Floyd B Parks, her number is DD-884. I am using a photo of a different ship because DD-883 and DD-884 are close enough for my purposes and I needed to use a non-copyrighted image.)

The next step is to cut all the fabrics into little tiny pieces. I spent several hours doing that while I was showing my work at the Laguna Art-A-Fair Festival. You can hear the background music along with the baby bird in the nest above a neighbor's booth.

Here's my pile of sky fabrics ready to collage together. But that's going to be for another day.