TIO's Santeria Dancer Done

Finally, I have paper pieced the bitty bits together. The whole time I'm thinking why wouldn't a person just do hand piecing. The template making and basting and whipstitching and removing basting and paper just seems like an excessive make work project.
"What ifs" crossed my mind. What if the back became the front and the papers were left in. I'm thinking love letters, photographs, painted paper..." What if"a dramatically contrasting thread was used as the whipstitch,it would show on the front leaving a subtle ciliated texture.
The use of many red/brown, green/browns and yellow/browns kept the skin tones vibrant. The batiks with light areas adds a bit of glow and depth to the abstract skin tones. The skin proved to be a challenging subject to abstract. I really had to look. Was it a shadow, highlight, contour? How did the seam lines contribute to controlling the viewers eye?
The colourful head scarf and clothing framed the face abstraction very well. TIO's photograph was a wonderful image to explore in such great detail. If you have a moment you will not be disappointed to see some of his other images. http://flickr.com/photos/66179962@N00/1840462551/

Colour Exploration

I was looking forward to doing the English Patchwork/Colour Exploration activity as soon as I saw it. I chose a photo by TIO, a New York photographer. He has kindly allowed me to use his vibrant image of a Santeria dancer. (I only know him as TIO.) This is the link to his picture. http://www.flickr.com/photos/66179962@N00/1840462551/
Objective: Observe and note colour gradations, patterns, textures, accent colours and proportions of colour in an image that has strong appeal.
Colour Observations: Yellow was predominantly warm (some red) with a small proportion of chartreuse (yellow with a smidge of its complement (violet). The chartreuse lifted the vibrant warm yellow even more. Blue-violet gradations are in the scarf. The head wrap was a mix of blues: blue tinted with white (highlights) and a lesser amount of blue shaded with black for the folds. The skin was where the challenge lay. Red/brown highlights. Green/brown shadows. Black brown heading to black in the darkest area.
Pattern: There are no strongly patterned areas. The texture relies on shadows and highlights. The skin has many nuances and colour changes in a small area.
Fabric Abstraction: Initially I followed the pencil crayon abstraction in selecting the fabric, but found I was loosing the life and vibrancy that attracted me to the image. The picture became my colour reference…for a while. At some point I abandoned the picture and responded to the dynamics of the fabric as more pieces were added. I tried adding the accent colours, the whites of the eyes, the lips, and the ear ring but found they were too representational for this abstract. I see in the picture that a few pieces are upstaging the others and the black is quite harsh in the corner. At this point I am leaving the pieces as is and starting in on the hand piecing.