I have chosen three images to work with for this exercise.  The first, to the right, is a postcard of Glide Girl by Sydney surfer and artist David Bell.  I like the colours, the sense of movement and the silhouette of the surfer.  It’s very stylised, simplified, uncluttered and clear.

My next image is from the catalogue of an exhibition I recently went to entitled Regeneration.

Indra’s Net is by Greg Somerville and is a large wallhanging.  I like the curvy nature of the piece.  It reminds me of a close up of something you might see under a microscope, perhaps cells jostling together.

This last image is the front of my latest Sudoku book.

I’ve put these three pictures in first because the light wasn’t great when I took the pictures of the mounted finished work and the original images look pretty poor unfortunately, as you can see below.  Anyway, at least the proper colours can be seen on the individual ones here.

For the Sudoku colour matching I decided to use watercolours as the front of the book has a washed out smooth appearance and I thought these paints would be most likely to create the same effect.

One of the blues has dried lighter than anticipated but other than that I’m happy with the outcome.  All the threads used for the card wrapping are smooth finish Perles or stranded cottons.

For this blue piece I have used acrylic paints.  They have all been applied smoothly except the dark blue where I tried to get a texture similar to the picture.

The thread wrapping, from left to right, is silk ribbon, rough cotton ‘twine’ style thread, smooth variegated gimp, stranded cotton, Perle 5 and finally a fluffy synthetic yarn with the orange tendrils.

Again, on this last piece, I have used acrylic paints but I have only painted the black sample completely smoothly.  There is a lot of texture in the background of the picture so I used an old fairly ragged ended brush to paint the chips to get the unevenness of colour.

The thread wrapping includes variegated width knitting yarn, crewel wool, Perle 8 & 5, fluffy chenille yarn, shiny viscose (the white) and stranded cotton.

This was a fun exercise and I can see an improvement in my painted colour mixing.  It certainly didn’t take as long as some of the paint mixing stages in earlier projects, so I must be getting a better eye and judgement for it.