FRACTURED GRAPES- Translating a photo into a quilted piece

This photo was issued by the Quilt Artists of Kentucky as a challenge. We were to translate it into a 12" square quilted piece.  I chose to print parts of the photo on fabric and go from there.

I started by cropping out the leaves and only printing the grapes on a 8"x10" piece of paper.
Here's the photo that I printed.

I then cropped out the leaves and printed them as narrow strips on paper.

I then sliced up the blueberries and alternated them with the leaf strips. I realized very quickly that I had over sliced the blueberries. So, this gave me a preview of what slicing up the printed fabric might look like.

I ended up slicing the pieces like so:

You can see that I reversed the inner leaf pieces and made the last grape piece larger. I also reduced the size of the dark red leaf border on the left.

I sewed all of the strips together and then squared up the piece.  I knew I needed borders on the top and bottom to make it 12"square. I found a piece of snow-dyed cotton sateen ( I had dyed 40 yards of cotton and silk fabric during the big March storm of 2015, so, I just happened to have something that was perfect for the borders.) and cut the borders out of it.

I then started quilting it.  I first outlined the grapes with Madiera FS20 Metallic thread.  You can see that the quilting has added real definition to the grapes. 

Then I quilted the leaves using a free motion veining design. 

Once I had completed most of the quilting, I started painting the grapes with Inktense Watercolor pencils. I was excited about seeing what kind of difference they would make on the grapes.  I colored in each grape and then brushed it with Golden Fabric Medium- GAC 900.  The medium caused the colors to flow and to heighten in intensity.  It's also easy to add in more color while the medium is still wet and easier to see where shading or highlighting might be needed. 

After letting the grapes dry overnight, I finished the rest of the quilting and proceeded to color in the rest of the piece.  The borders were covered with Fabric medium mixed with paint pearls by Jaquard.

I finished off the grapes with a slight coating of gold metallic Tushineko Ink, that gave the grapes a lovely frosted look.

I am going to try printing and painting again. I really love working with the watercolor pencils. I've also discovered that I can use Prismacolor and other brands of watercolor pencils that give the same effect and allow me to work with a broader range of colors.  I'm also excited about adding in details with ink pens. No telling where this will all go.

Off to a night on the town with the husband and friends,
Enjoy,

Karen