Time for Black

I've finished piecing and basting the orange-red tier of "Shelter" (photo at end of post), and am now moving on to the final tier of black. Each tier has posed new challenges--up to this point all issues of construction and piecing. For the black tier, the challenge is in color/value. The blue, turquoise, and orange-red tiers have used variation in value (and to some extent in color) for contrast within the piecing. But lighter values of black would bring in gray, and I don't think that belongs. So I'm going to try variations in texture, variations in color (blue/black, brown/black), and a very little bit of variation in value to dark gray. The very dark black in the photo above is velvet, which I got for texture, but it also does value. In the photo below, you can see a bit of the brownish and bluish batiks as well; for some reason everything except the thin bit of velvet looks gray here, but they are black in real life.

And here's a shot of the orange-red tier, with one strata of blacks up against it for a glimpse of what is to come: