The Color-Aid Adventure Continues or "I'd rather fussy cut fabric for a quilt"

In the "More of the "Training our Eye for Color" adventure" blog post I revealed we were not yet done with the packet of Color-Aid paint cards.

For the next project we were assigned the task of creating a 7" x 7" design that we would recreate with the 4.5" x 6" Color-Aid cards to show a focus on pattern, dimension, light or transparency (or a combination of the 4).

I pondered options and drew some sketches of my ideas:
(Click on the pictures to enlarge if you're curious. 
Again...apologies for the light drawings - which make for poor photographs.)

 

Above left - #1 Sun/heat & Monsoon/water. 

Above right: #2 A window with curtain blowing in breeze. 

 

Above left - #3 Quilt inspired Window Pane with Cat.
Above right - #4 Stylized Sun/Wind/Mountain Range.

 

Above left - #5 Quilt inspired Log Cabin/Pinwheel
Above right - #6 Quilt inspired Celtic Chain

I reviewed my ideas with the teacher and although we both found #1 (Sun & Water) & # 4 (Mtn. Range) intriguing, #6 was also favored. And I chose to go with #6 - which was based on a pattern in "Celtic Pieced Illusions" by Karen Combs. {A truly spiffy and clever book!}

My focus was going to be Transparency and I pulled several ranges of colors from the remaining cards in my Color-Aid. Then I started trying to pull cards that would support the color transitions/transparency as the Celtic chain/cables crossed each other.

It was challenging to find a range of colors that would work. The closest I got was with a "rainbow" in bright primary colors. I shifted my palate some to find good transparency matches - and the teacher approved my choices.
{whew}
She assisted me in choosing background colors and I set to work.
{Foreshadowing...we didn't consider the background color effect with ALL the chain colors.}

Yep, I went through several xacto knife
blades on this project.

Based on the amount of time available before the project was due, and the number of tiny pieces to cut out, I chose to cut some same-color background sections as 1 piece.
{More Foreshadowing...this did not allow me to transition background colors as well as I could have.} {sigh}

There was a great deal of fussy-cutting and I credit my sanity to listening to the CraftLit podcast whilst I cut and re-cut many, many small pieces of paper out of the templates and then reversed those pieces to cut from the back of the Color-Aid cards.

I decided pretty early on that fussy-cutting fabric for a quilt was easier than this Color-Aid project.
I had already learned that it is a bad idea to cut bits of Color-aid with a dull Xacto blade. {sigh}

The 1st pass of cuttings were pasted down with temporary glue.

The flaws with the background color is evident in this picture. 

As I transferred the "good" pieces to another background, I decided which {many} needed to be re-cut so the pieces would fit better. And then I used the permanent-glue glue-stick to adhere the pieces to the "fresh" background.

{I was getting really tired of glue about this time.}

When all the pieces were well and permanently pieced, I carefully trimmed down the colorful Celtic cable pattern and ...

{The yellow & backgrounds don't look too bad in this lighting.}

.... and applied it to the freshly cut/appropriately-sized mat/background.

As foreshadowed above, the review in class brought to light that the background colors washed out/made the yellow cables invisible and that the background color transitions would have worked better if I'd cut all the individual squares/triangles instead of going with the larger pieces.
And...because it was the background {and permanent glue}, it wasn't something I could easily fix.
{sigh}

However, the teacher said I did an excellent job of cutting/placing all the pieces and I did represent transparency very well in the over/under crosses of the cables and the colors I chose.

And yes, this project was a neatly-planned stepping stone {training} for the final Color and Composition project - in Triplicate.