"After Midnight"

In April my little art quilt group issued a friendly challenge: Create an art quilt inspired in some way by a photo used to make a jig saw puzzle of Times Square in New York City.    

I put the photo up on my design wall and just looked at it for a while.  Eventually I decided that three sections were the most interesting to me.

I liked the strong values of the red, yellow and blue colors, the contrast of the dark night sky against the bright city lights, the simple shapes of the buildings in the center photograph, and the crosswalk in the first and last photo. Could I add the crosswalk to the middle photo?  Yes, I could, at least on paper!

I also decided that I wanted to use this challenge to practice some of the techniques for making a realistic image that I had learned in several workshops I'd taken last year.  Making an abstract would be a lot of fun and fairly easy for me, but I challenged myself to try try something new in this piece.

I don't usually make any kind of preliminary sketch, preferring to simply start cutting out shapes from fabric, but it was clear to me that this image with so many straight lines would need a drawing.  I also wanted to try using a mylar overlay to get the shapes planned and positioned correctly.  I put a photo of the image into Photoshop and used a filter that emphasized the building lines.  I simplifed the drawing, saved it as a b&w image, and took the file to a local print shop which enlarged it and made two different sizes of printouts.  Once I saw the large printouts, I picked the size that looked best to me.

Then I traced the enlarged drawing onto mylar.  I'd never done this before but it was fairly easy following instructions in Susan Brubaker Knapp's book, Point, Click, Quilt, which I had bought after hearing her presentation to a local quilt guild.

The next step was to find a good "canvas," a fabric to which the fabric buildings and signs would be attached.  After trying out several fabrics I decided to hand-paint the "canvas" by taking some white cotton fabric and painting it with a mix of black and deep metallic blue fabric paint.  It was so much fun that I painted two other pieces before I stopped.

Then, using the aids of the drawing and the Mylar overlay I began to select fabrics for the buildings and to position the pieces.  To affix the pieces to the canvas I tried a product I hadn't used before, Steam-a-Seam Lite 2, which allows the pieces to be placed temporarily, moved around, and then finally permanently affixed.   I thought this product would be great on this image where the shapes and signs had to be so carefully placed.   But I had trouble with it and had to spend a lot of time learning how to use it by reading instructions, watching videos, and experimenting.  It was frustrating but I did finally figure it out and was able to use it effectively in trying out different fabrics for the buildings. 

Here's a photo of the work once the big shapes were applied.  I used a variety of fabrics; cottons, batiks, silks, and upholstery fabrics.  The crosswalk at the bottom is from an old silk tie.

Comparing the above image to the one below, you can see that I continued to play around with the placement of the various elements.  Paul showed me how to put a photo of the piece into Photoshop and use the Perspective filter to make sure my lines were straight before I started stitching down the buildings.  

In the photo below I've also tacked up a paper image of a yellow cab I found on the web to see how it would look.  To copy the cab and signs onto fabric which could then be stitched into the image, I used an "image transfer" method involving a cleaning product called Citrasolve, following instructions in a very well- written tutorial by quilt artist Lyric Kinard which you can see here.   

I began to stitch lines on the buildings to define them better and played around with the marque over the Kodak sign.  I'd never done this type of thing before and every step was nerve wracking!   Several times I had to take a break and leave the piece for a while.   

The moon was a good touch, don't you think?  

As the piece evolved I painted in the night clouds and the curved lines of the building above the Kodak sign, stitched down the cab and the signs, and used paints and Sharpie pens to add the shading that gives more dimension to the various elements.  I backed the quilt top with batting and a backing and quilted it simply with a few lines around the buildings and around the night clouds, and I added some paint and stitching to make the little light on the right glow.   

  

In the above photo you can see two problems that I had to fix.  The right hand side had an uneven edge that I hadn't painted and the yellow clock wasn't fitting in well.  I painted the unfinished edge and trimmed up the piece so it measured correctly all the way around, and finished the edge with a black cord.   It took longer to get the clock right.   I found a great one on the web and played around with it in Photoshop for a while before I got it the right size and facing the correct way.  Then I realized the clock was flat and wasn't matching the perspective on the buildings.  Clever Paul again helped me, taking the clock image into Photoshop to add a "Warp" filter  which gave the clock the same perspective as the buildings.  I was pleased; it can be so nice to have teen around the house!

Here's the finished piece, which measures 15"x17"'.

And here's a detail of the clock, showing the time as just "After Midnight."

I was pleased with how it turned out.  And actually, I ended up making three different pieces related to this challenge.  This one and two abstracts, all of which were inspired by the colors and shapes of the original photograph.  But how I made the two abstract quilts is a story for another day!