Tracing Trees

I started converting my picture of the curving oak trees into a state that I could abstract out the lines for a quilt design.

First, I printed out the black and white version and traced it. But it kind of ending up being too busy and I got lost in all the details.

To get some of the details out of the picture I flipped the printout over. 

Then I traced the flipped over printout. I think this was much better and will be easier to transition into a quilt design. The class I'm taking uses various size widths of bias tape to make a quilt top, and this sketch will lend itself pretty well to that. I'm feeling pretty ready for that class now.

I also had the idea of using the shape of the trail that we hiked as an additional design element.

I traced the trail that we followed and it looks like kind of like vague country outlines. I think that it's also the wrong size to incorporate with the size of the tree tracing. I'm thinking this might be good to use as the quilting design once the top is done with the tree outline curves, but blown up much much bigger. Almost like the topographic curve lines on the map printout give another dimension.