I’m really late doing the first quarter Fauvism challenge, I thought I understood it, but every time I had an idea and started to work on it, it didn’t seem right. I finally decided on a picture to use last week, one of my favourite pictures of the lake at Sefton Park, Aigburth. I used it for a previous challenge, Marilyn’s Monet Challenge, and thought it’d be interesting to do a comparison. Then right at the last minute yesterday after looking at the other entries and googling ‘fauvism’ again, it didn’t seem right! But, looking at the other entries reminded me of my sister’s photo which I used to make a felt picture a couple of years ago. Here’e the post if you don’t remember: https://feltingandfiberstudio.com/2015/08/19/felt-picture/  and here’s the picture I made:

I took the original photo (without permission, hope she doesn’t mind!) and altered the colours in Photoshop:

I’d had in my head that Fauvism was really bright, but the more I looked, the more I saw muted colours, unsaturated shades. There’s one particular jade green that I started to see everywhere! I simplified the picture to get the colour bands:

And added some ‘accented edges’:

Then I blended the last one and first one together:

A lot of the Fauvist paintings had roughly blended brush strokes and patchy areas so I blended some colours for each band to try to get that effect:

I don’t know which photo shows it better:

Then I added embellishment fibres for mre effect, this is some Kapok on the pink, there’s a bit of silk on the blue, trilobal nylon on the orange, and nylon staple on the blue:

I don’t know why I did that second band blue, I can see it’s green on the photo, I clearly wrote ‘green’ on my template, and somehow chose blue! Maybe I tilted my laptop screen back too far (good excuse!) I did realise before felting and changed it:

The other embellishments and fibres I added are: some dark blue wool and light blue nylon for trees at the top; some green wool and red nylon for trees between the top orange row and blue one underneath it; green and yellow viscose staple on the green layer and some dark blue nylon for a hedge. The track lines are wool; I used viscose and nylon on the lower orangey band, and the blue/purple band at the bottom has dyed cotton nepps and nylon staple fibre added. This angle might show them a bit better:

I only got it felted early evening, so here it is pegged on the washing line to dry, I haven’t even had a look at it yet today!

I love the colours, but I put far more detail and work into the first one, so it looks dull and flat in comparison, so I think I will add some stitching to this to improve it 🙂