Colour Challenge

On the Felting and Fiber Studio, we have Quarterly Challenges. This year is all about Colour. For the 2nd Quarter Challenge, Ann challenged us to use a photo to generate a colour palette to work with. I chose a digital painting of mine to play around with:

I started off using Photoshop. The first filter I used was Median, I wanted to get a simplified version of the painting:

I then used some other filters to get more defined areas of colour. This one was Mosaic, I set the cell size to 50:

And this was Mosaic with the cell size set to 200:

I used the Crystalise filter set to 200 for the cell size on this one, the colours are similar to the 200 Mosaic one, but because it follows the shape of the original more and isn't square, there is  more colour variation:

The last version I did using Photoshop was using the Gaussian Blur filter. I selected 5cm x 5cm squares, then blurred that section to one colour:

I uploaded the image to a site Ann recommended, Color Palette FX, and this was the result:

I also used one which had been tried on the Felting and Fiber forum, Moda Palette Builder. This was a bit different, it didn't reduce the picture to a few equalised colours, but you  choose which areas of the picture you want to pick out colours from to create a pallette:

I always enjoy messing around with colour and on Photoshop, so this was fun. If you're interested and want to join in the challenge and show us your results, come and join the forum or use the Contact Us form on the Studio Site, we're always interested in anything felt or fibre related and would be happy to do a blog post feature :)

Karakul

I was hoping to get some time for felting yesterday, but I had vertigo and felt rotten so I'm posting some pieces I made a few weeks ago. I got two different Karakul batts from wollknoll, one is just Karakul and the other is a Karakul and Merino blend. Just be warned if you google Karakul, you'll probably get some pretty awful photos of dead lambs because their skin is used to make hats and coats because their wool is black and silky soft when they are born, and they don't often make it that far so there's quite a few photos of dead sheep too. This wool is sheared the usual way though. It is double coated and very wiry, it reminds me a lot of a Cairn Terrier my friend had when we were kids:

I used some dyed silvery flax with the Karakul, spreading it thinly across the top and bottom, and laid it  vertically in the centre:

It looked like it was just sitting on the surface:

The contrast of the 'dry' looking Karakul and shiny flax, made the flax look like it was still wet:

The Karakul and Merino looked and felted similarly, though less 'openly' or loosely and was a lighter shade:

Both of the batts had bits of VM in which looked like porridge oats or tiny cornflakes. A few of the batts I got had similar VM:

I used some crimped Viscose fibre with this:

This is some Viscose which wasn't teased apart much:

This is a patch where the Viscose was teased apart a lot and laid on quite thickly:

And this is where the teased out Viscose was laid quite sparsely: