Constructing Little Ainia the Amazon

Here we are with another group project that I signed up for and completed this year, through RedDog Scott's Traveler's Hart group.


We were all given the same two vintage photos to work with (courtesy of Lunaea), and each artist also received a fill-in-the-blank storyline.


Mine was: "From the top of ______________, Little Ainia could see ________."


We each completed an art piece, as well as a text card with our line filled in. So that with the whole deck of art/text cards you could make a story. It was really fun to see what each artist did with the Little Ainia character, you can see them all here on the Capolan website.. She has such a fierce, yet child-like expression, I wonder what kind of adult she grew up to become??





To begin I printed both of the pictures out on silk, I wasn't sure which one I was going to work with. The size of the art card is 3x5", so I usually do my art in a 6x10" format and reduce by 50% when copying for the swap. I start with a piece of backing fabric, a slightly oversized piece of fusible batting (Hobbs 80/20), the printed photos and my current working bag of fabric scraps.
I begin making a landscapish kind of setting. The mottled grey reminds me of the granite domes of Yosemite. I liked the grey/black leafy forest print for setting her image against.
I tried out both versions of the photo, but settled on the pointing the spear at you version. The city fabric worked for the city down below the granite dome, and oh look a giant flower compared to the size of the fabric.
But the background of the photo is too big. After trimming it down a bit I'm satisfied and begin quilting.
As this was striking me as sort of graphic novel-ish, I used black thread to outline and stitch, as well as do the edge of the quilt.

This is the text card that I came up with.
My storyline says:
"From the top of the granite dome, Ainia could see the fabled city of flowers."