Nick's portrait

I have wanted to make a portrait quilt of my grandson, Nick, for quite a few years.  I finally got a picture of him with shadows on one side of his face.  His favorite color is orange, and his college colors are purple and gold.  I know that the combination of these 3 colors are not a traditional color pallet, but that was OK with me.

Here is the picture that was sent to me by his Dad (my son).

I used the technique taught to me by Lynn Czaban several years ago.  It is a process that she still teaches today, and that I've blogged about before as well.  She taught me how to get the picture into Photoshop, change it into gray scale, then play with the levels of both the gray scale and the posterization to get the final image.  I like 7 levels of color change.   Here is the picture from which I worked:

I did the eyes first, and since Nick has gorgeous green eyes, I decided to make them green instead of orange for this portrait.  I did the teeth next and worked my way through the face in the orange color scheme.  It was onto the clothing next which was done in shades of purple and gold.  I tried a few background fabrics and, after consulting with several people, landed on the green.

But.... before I stitched down the face to the background, I cut out the left eye and the teeth because they did not look right at all.  Then I remade the left eye and the teeth and did a lot of colorization with both ink pencils and permanent markers. (Can you see the difference in the eye and teeth?)

I used several colors of both orange and purple to do the quilting.  Then I did a little more inking and shading.

Here is the final quilt:

Nick's Portrait by Joanne Adams Roth 2018

I hope he likes it, and I hope you like it too!

And thanks so much for reading my blog.