Another North Face View Finished

It took me almost a month, but I’ve finished my second needle felt from one of our Ben Nevis North Face hike pictures. Some of this is because I had a long break between felting sessions. This is how far I’d gotten with it by November 10th:

I’d previously finished laying down a first layer of colors across the whole piece, and so I focused on working my way from background up through foreground again with more detail. In the photo above, I’d finished up the sky and mostly finished the furthest range of peaks with their layers of fog. But the ridge in the foreground was still pretty rough.

Yesterday I had a nice chunk of time and was able to finish the piece:

I worked in a few of the new colors I’d just purchased, and they really helped round out some of the shades I needed for it. One of my challenges in art is figuring out what I need to exaggerate to make it look right. I usually have to remind myself to make the darks darker, but for this one I also needed to make some of the light areas brighter to emphasize the shapes and depth in a simplified format.

I also added more warmth with a little extra orange to the rocks on the front ridge to help it stand out from the further ridge of rocks.

We’ve hung it up in the kitchen over the work table where I do most of my veggie chopping. I rather think this is my favorite one so far, and the larger size definitely expanded what I could do with the image I was using. Twice the size doesn’t seem to equate to twice the time though – it’s more like 3x because I’m not just double the surface I need to cover – I’m expanding the detailing I can do.

I really can’t tell you how happy I am with it. I’m frankly a little shocked with myself each time I see it that I made this – this is from my mind, my hands, my skill.

And lest you think poorly of me, because it sounds like I’m bragging, the awe I feel that I can produce something that makes me so happy comes with the fear that this is it. I have to squash the nasty little thought that tells me “you try this again, you know it’ll be crap. You can’t pull the same thing off twice. Better just stop now and be happy with it. Also, it’s not even really that good. You’re just delusional.” Thanks inner critic for the pep talk. Please go boil your head now.

So, my goal to myself – start another before the week is out. Don’t let the grass grow and all that. Which means I get to go look through my photos to see what I want to do next, while working on my modular knitting blanket.