Picasso challenge piece and PDF pattern

The October EBW Challenge theme is Inspired by Picasso.  You can read more about it here.  I am familiar with Picasso's more famous works but had really not studied any of his other work before.  There is a lot of it so it was fun familiarizing myself with lots of Picasso paintings and sketches.  I'm sure that it's not a surprise that the first thing that I gravitated toward was color.  I wanted to pick a piece with a lot of color, which is how I ended up choosing Mediterranean Landscape for my inspiration.

I posted a shot of it earlier but here it is again.  I got this picture from allposters.com.

You can read about how I selected and mixed my colors here.  Overall, I'm really pleased with how that process went, especially considering that I only used colors that I had in stock.  I didn't purchase anything new for this project.  There are a couple tiny things that I could have tweaked, but I still think that the general color palette and nature of the piece is fairly reflective of the original artwork.

I've now used the same right angle weave base and second layer for four EBW challenges in a row.  I'll briefly recap here so you can see how changing the final third layer, width, and color combinations can make such a big difference.

Strawberry Fields Forever is exactly the same design but wider.  I'll be honest: I was planning to make my Picasso piece the same width but decided I couldn't quite pull it off with some of the bead quantities I had.  Four columns instead of six is just fine and also results in a less expensive piece so hopefully that will be more appealing to some people.

After some deliberation, I did decide to add house and sail boat charms to the clasp.  They are easily removable if potential buyers aren't interested in them.  I do think that they add something for the challenge, though.

I thought that keeping the correct color balance with so many colors would be tricky, but I think that the selecting and mixing process got me oriented before I even started working.  I really didn't have any problems with this and didn't even have to refer back to my mixing chart like I thought I would.

This piece is available in my Etsy shop here.

As this was a design that I have worked with a lot over the last few months, the trickiest part of the challenge is that I decided to write the pattern for this.  I'd be contemplating this idea after the success of Strawberry Fields.  Once I knew that I was going to use the design for Picasso, I knew that I had to ahead with it.  I believe in embracing the "challenge" idea with as many pieces as possible.  The pattern was a perfect way to do this.

It was also way past time for me to get another pattern in my shop.  Most of my patterns have done pretty well, but it's been nearly six months since I released my last one.  I have not had great sales for September.  I hope that a new pattern will increase sales again.  It's available here.

The pattern does work for all four of the challenge designs.  The first and second layers are exactly the same for all four pieces.  I explain the differences for the third layer in the pattern.  With the exception of Yellow Brick Road, all of the pieces have a freeform third layer so you really have the freedom to do it exactly as you like.  I just provide some suggestions to guide you on your way.