If you’re not going to print the photograph onto fabric and play with it that way, you’re probably going to need to find some fabrics that in some way mimic what you’re trying to capture of the photo. Colors. Shapes. Mood. All of those can be recreated in some way using the fabrics you can find in a quilt store.
When I was looking at fabrics for the Horseshoe Canyon quilt, I was mostly trying to capture color, but I wasn’t necessarily trying to be 100% faithful to the original image. There was no way that anyone could have gotten me to produce a quilt where all of that orange was replaced by the rust colors in the original image. Nope. That’s not how I see that image in my mind’s eye, and I knew the rust colors of the canyon weren’t going to translate well into a quilt. In retrospect, would I have incorporated a few rusts here and there among all of those orange strips of fabric? Maybe. I don’t know what that might have looked like. But I might have entertained the thought, at least, instead of simply blazing ahead with all of those awfully bright oranges. I wanted the quilt to be saturated colors, not muted ones, and the orange truly came through for me in that respect. I also liked the combination of bright blue and orange with a deep, dark green, and in that sense the final quilt is a success.
Look back at the unsuccessful (read: BOOOORING) version of that image from Norway that made me rethink all of the ideas I had to create fabric versions of some of my favorite photos. For that attempt, I was trying much harder to be faithful to the original coloring of the image, and look where it got me. It got me a snoozefest. Granted, I don’t necessarily think choosing different colors might have worked better, but certainly going with the original coloring wasn’t as successful as I had thought it might be.
I’m currently choosing fabrics for two of the three quilts I’m working on. (The third is thread painting, so no extra fabrics until I add a border, and I won’t even think about border fabric until the inside image is complete.) For the Tracy Arm iceberg one, I’m trying as much as possible to maintain the feel of the original photograph, if not the exact original colors. The goal for that quilt is to emphasize the brilliant blue green of the iceberg, which the photo does nicely. But I have a chance to keep the feeling of the photo yet enhance the contrast between the rest of the image and the iceberg. I have selected some fabrics from my stash, but I’m also looking for others. And I’m debating what to do about the snow on the mountains in the original image. I’m just not going to find that in a fabric. So – do I leave it out? Do I insert it with thread (not fabric) at the end? Do I attempt to find a good snow fabric that might suffice in small quantities? I might try all three and see which one I like best.
For the abstract iceberg image, I’m mostly going for the colors. Those are what drew me to the photo when it was being displayed on the big screen on the ship, and I think that image might not be as good if it were just plain white ice, for example. The blue green of the ice is compelling to me (hence my wanting to do two different quilts with that color as the emphasis). The challenge here is going to be finding the right blue green, with enough variation and quantity that it will fill out the quilt nicely.