When Lyn and Annie announced the Third Quarter Challenge, I definitely felt challenged. The challenge is to create a Cityscape. I tend toward natural inspirations instead of man made inspiration.

It’s not that I don’t have photos of cities, I do. We have been to New York City three times and I do have photos of the city. But the skyline just doesn’t excite me much, especially attempting it in felt.

I then thought about doing something with graffiti. That might be interesting but again, I wasn’t very inspired.

I even considered using a photo like this with rusty bits and natural stone that was taken in NYC but this really doesn’t say cityscape.

Then I started thinking about how I could relate a cityscape to Montana and my surroundings. Perhaps I could do a cityscape of Whitefish, where my store is located? But that seemed too touristy and overdone to me. Then I thought about old west and what constituted a city in the old west. Perhaps I could use a ghost town as an inspiration. I know I’m stretching it a bit but…

Since I have visited Garnet, Montana, a ghost town, I decided to use it for inspiration. You can read about it’s history here.  You can also see some photos of the buildings on that site as well.

I googled Garnet Ghost Town for images and found quite a few of the buildings. But the ones that intrigued me were the night sky photos. And this was my favorite. I ended up printing out several night sky photos as well as some of the daylight photos that showed the main buildings better.

Using the inspiration photos, I drew a sketch of where the buildings would be placed. I also needed the approximate scale of the buildings so I could create prefelt building shapes. The plan was to make the buildings in prefelt. All of the details would be added later with machine stitching. So I had my basic design for my “cityscape”. Not really much of a city but it would have to do! Next week I will show you the felting portion of the “cityscape”.

Have you tried one of our challenges? We’d love to see what you create. Show us over on the forum or if you’d like to write a guest post, just let me know.