Quilling the Moon: Progress in the South

Some progress!

Even more progress!

As of this moment, I've finally completed my Moon, but I want to post some of the intermediate pictures to show the progress.  So I'll be finishing up the Moon blogging in another post or so.  But for now, compare the two images here and you can see how the edge of the Procellarum basin expanded towards the center of the image, and how the highlands were filled in from the right.

The mare sections at the top and left of Copernicus crater were really challenging.  As I approached the bottom of the Imbrium basin, I got more and more nervous about exactly how the basins would 'express' themselves.  I wanted them to be bold and easily recognized, but didn't want to lose the subtlety of the interesting margins, and of the craters and their ejecta.  So I moved very carefully, filling in the area to ensure that the basin would have an obvious round edge to it, but also ensuring that all the important tiny features could still be seen.

Close up of the area around
Copernicus.

Looking at the close up image makes this all seem so straightforward and easy!  But since every single quill was created on the fly - size, color, and placement - it was really very difficult.  But I do like the general effect.  It is certainly the Moon, and it has a strong mosaic look without losing the lacy feel that quilling offers.

What I'm starting to worry about now is how to hide the errors I'm spotting.  Like how my Moon is not a perfect circle anymore.  Pressure from the different areas as I glued them in place slowly altered the nature of the outline - it isn't quite a perfect circle.  I can see flatter areas, and areas with slight bulges.  Not sure how to hide this - I was already planning to put mat board around the outline, so perhaps this will make the project look more even.

Image Credits - My pix of my own quilling, my design!

Quilling the Moon: The Edge of Procellarum and Some Lessons

The first portion is filled in.

Here's some progress on my quilled Moon!  I filled in the areas of the highlands and the edge of the mare on the south eastern portion of the Moon.  Many lessons were learned during this initial phase of the project, and I'm sure I'll be going back to this section when it is all finished, and thinking, oh yeah, could have done that bit better.  But there is always room for improvement on any project, and if you wait for perfection, you get nothing!

Color choice - very tricky.

One lesson I learned is that I need better quilling lighting.  Working with dark paper in anything less than bright light is a chore.  It is too hard to see if the quills are nicely coiled, and to determine the perfect sizes to fit together in the mare regions.  So the lesson was twofold - buy a lamp, and also, only work on the mare regions during the daytime!  Another lesson, one I knew but had to have reinforced, was use the tiniest amounts of glue possible.  It really shows up in the dark regions, and I had to take out and redo some sections just to eliminate small glue spots I couldn't get rid of with my tweezers. 

I had no idea that only working with four colors could make color choice so difficult.  But it is.  Each and every one of these quills is an agony of choice.  The regions at the edge of bright/dark regions are particularly challenging.  How and at what point does the gradation start?  Some of the margins were easy, since they were very 'digital' - one side bright and the other dark.  But the messy grey regions ... very challenging.  I spent a lot of time making decisions between what met my artistic vision, and what was the most scientifically accurate.

One of the greatest challenges was the quilling around Copernicus crater, the larger bright crater on the right side of this image.  But I'll talk more about that next time!

Image Credits:  My pix of my own quilling!

Quilling Supplies: Little Circles

I put in a few orders recently to various suppliers to bump up my quilling inventory (including adding some books to my collection).  My Little Circles order arrived not a moment too soon, as they say!

I realized pretty quickly that I had not ordered enough paper for my quilled Moon, and put an order in for the two colors I was sure to run out of, the colors for the mare (Feathered Fedora) and the highlands (Fish Scales).  I also decided I'd do a bit of a review of Little Circles Paper in the future - like I did with Quilled Creations earlier this month.  So I put an order in for the paper sampler so I could play with it and add that knowledge to my review.  I also just love to have gorgeous rainbow samplers in my supplies.  So pretty.

I was curious about their new line of paper, 'On Edge.'  This is heavier weight paper, like card stock, that is designed to be used for outlining.  Outlining and paper line art has become very popular, especially for outlining letters in typography style pieces.  So I thought I'd give it a shot and see how it worked.  I bought one pack of the white 'On Edge' to play around with.  Plus I bought some tools - these are bamboo 'dowels' of various diameters that can be used in a variety of ways.  I've purchased them to help me make flower petals and such.  Last, there was a nice variety pack of extra paper added to the shipment as a free bonus.  Nice!

Keep your eyes on the blog for my upcoming review of how the Little Circles paper worked out for me.

Image Credit - My picture of my new quilling stuff from Little Circles. 

Quilling the Moon: Beginning the Design

Deep breath - start quilling.

As noted in my previous post on the topic, I made a few decisions, like size and color choices, about my Moon.  And then started in ... with more thinking ...

Experiment with some circles,
add some rays to craters.

Armed with only four colors, I considered the Moon.  How would the design look?  Too many options.  I tried a few things, big swirls say, which did not work because there just wasn't enough detail.  Teardrop shapes.  Also did not work because there are too many really small circular features I couldn't depict that way.  I considered the fact that I study impact craters as a scientist, and then I made my choice.  Circles.  Tiny circles.  I'd do the whole thing in circles - not all the same size, since that would look too mechanical, and maybe too much like cross stitch or something.  Nope, I'd vary the size but have no circles with paper longer than about 4.5 inches.  And since I roll my paper pretty tight, that's a small circle.  Most of the Moon would be done with paper in the 2 inch length zone.

Tycho and the Southern Highlands
begin to take shape.

Right.  I also decided I wanted a subtle 'ray' effect for those craters that had rays.  After all, Tycho (the big light splash of a crater in the southern part of the Moon) would just not look the same without rays.  So I started out, putting up a few strips on their side to be the outline of the Moon, and the rays.  Then I started with Tycho, filling in just around the ejecta blanket of the crater in bright white, and out a bit into the highlands with the very light ivory and then some of the medium grey.  I liked the look, thank heavens, and so was inspired to keep on going!

Image Credits:  My pictures of my own quilling, my design.

Quilling the Moon: Starting Considerations

Beautiful full Moon - must quill.

I've been telling myself for many, many years that I should quill the Moon in some fashion or other.  The Moon is one of my very favorite objects - I am a lunar scientist after all, and have been studying the surface of that world since I started college thirty years ago.  Thirty years is a long time to have a Moon fixation, be a quiller, and not quill the Moon.

My motivation for doing this now is mostly to have a piece to display at an upcoming science conference in October that has a small space art exhibit associated with it.  And in addition, there is a yearly competition over at Little Circles for quilling that I'm planning to enter this into, as well.

So even though I am not quite finished with my herb sampler from earlier in the year, I am plowing into another project anyway.  Well, plowing might be a strong word.  The first things I'm doing are: taking a good look at a lot of data from the Moon, buying a bunch of grey paper, and pondering what the heck to do with it.

One of the big things I'm fighting as I make this Moon thingy is my need for scientific accuracy.  I have to balance this against design and artistic needs.  This isn't a photograph I'm making after all, this is a quilled piece whose purpose is to evoke the Moon in more of an emotional fashion.  But one can't just turn off being a scientist, so that tension is informing the entire piece.

I found a picture of the Moon that I liked from my many NASA interests, and chose to blow it up to about eight inches in diameter.  I wanted to make it small enough that I'd actually complete it before a decade went by, but big enough that I could portray the craters in enough detail for my scientific perfectionism.

Paper strips, 1/4" in shades of grey.

After doing that, I bought a pile of grey paper.  I'd never bought paper from Little Circles before, so I chose to buy all these colors from their Culture Pop quilling paper line.  I'll talk more about using Culture Pop specifically in another post.  The colors, from pitch black to bright white are:  Velvety Darkness, Feathered Fedora, Steel Guitar, Bottlenose Dolphin, Indoor Recess, Fish Scales, and Photographer's Umbrella.  I went with the quarter inch wide paper instead of the normal eighth inch paper because I wanted the Moon to have a more substantial feel to it.  More mosaic-y I guess.  More depth.

My first choice in color was not to make the dark regions of the Moon out of pitch black.  As you can see from the picture of the full Moon, the dark regions, that is the 'mare' (pronounced "mar-ay") are not as black as space.  But I did want a good contrast, so I chose a very dark grey, the Feathered Fedora, as my major mare color. 

For the highlands, the brighter areas of the Moon,  I wanted to make the rayed craters the only thing in bright white.  So that meant choosing another color for the bulk of the bright areas.  I had to pick between the sort of ivory-ish color and the mottled grey color.  In the end, I liked the sort of 'bone' look of the very light ivory (thinking about bones and how these areas have a lot of high calcium rocks), and went with 'Fish Scales.'  I also decided I didn't like the sort of mottled look of the quills made with Indoor Recess, so saved that paper for other projects.  I also chose not to use the Steel Guitar at all, because it has a blue undertone that did not mix well with the Fish Scales, at least in my view.  That left me with just one more color, Bottlenose Dolphin as my intermediate grey to fill in the odd areas that are either darker highlands, brighter mare, or mixed regions with no clear color choice.

Enough for now!

Image Credits:  Moon, NASA.  Strips, my quilling strips from my supplies, my pic.

Quilling Conference - NAQG, Day Two

Meeting Jane Jenkins!

It's past time to wrap up my visit way back in May to the NAQG conference in Nashville!  My first post on day one can be found here.

Weaving - Harder than It Looks.

Day two opened with a weaving class.  I've not done much but the most elementary weaving in the past, so this was very interesting for me.  I enjoyed the class, especially meeting Quilling illuminary Jane Jenkins!  Still, I don't think I'm going to be doing a lot of weaving in the future - not because I don't like it - but because I don't like pins!  So many pins!  I really don't enjoy keeping track of all those sharp bits of metal around my craft area.  Seriously, that's just one of my issues.  Every single line has two pins to hold it down.  If I'm going to be weaving, I need to find a new way to secure strips for the process.

My gifted quilled elephant!

Cards and gift tags I made in free time.

I spent the late morning and early afternoon in free quilling.  Just sitting around with other quillers and having fun.  I quilled some cards, name tags, and more, while new friends quilled other marvels.  One of which was a wonderful quilled elephant with dragonflies!  I loved it immediately, and was thrilled and humbled when the artist presented it to me to have, for my very own!  We also saw a few people from the general public come in, and they stopped by our table very briefly.  But we were no match for the draw that Jane and her husband Paul were making at a nearby table, quilling 'fluffy' teddy bears.

Buddha under Bodhi Tree

I spent some time wandering through the competition/display room.  This is a room where both competition and general display items were available for attendees to check out.  Any registrants for the conference could ask to have some portion of a table set aside to display some of their work.  And of course various competition categories also had work on display (although without names.)  This made it a little difficult to figure out who did what piece of work.  My favorite, a Buddha, was done by an artist whose name I still don't know!  That was one of the points of the competition that was a little frustrating - since winners were announced at the last minute at the banquet, one never really got a chance to find out who did what piece of art.

The evening entertainment was live music and a banquet.  We had a wonderful time together, listening to local music and enjoying the raffle.  I really enjoyed watching my table-mates root for one another as various pieces in the raffle came up.  Many classic pieces of quilling were donated for the raffle, and were given as gifts for each one of us!  These quillers were very generous.

Examples of pieces under judging -
my Halloween Sampler is on the right!

And then it was time to go home.  I really had hoped there would be more time after the banquet to peruse the art in the display room and figure out who had done what!  But the art was removed quickly ... I was not ready to go!  But the conference was over, and planning for next year has begun!

All in all, it was a great event, and I'm trying to see how I can fit another May trip (this time to Tampa) in my travel schedule for May 2017.

Image credits - All pictures taken by me at the NAGQ 2106 conference.