Paper Piecing Rick Sanchez

Although I've never done any quilting before, I'm fascinated by paper piecing.  Regular quilting seems a little too intimidating, but the paper thing I think I could do.  Rather than starting simple, I decided to try to figure out how to do it on a very complex design - what could go wrong?  This is probably another thing that I'll make and then never think about again, but it was fun.  I had a few false starts.  Designing paper piecing is harder than it looks.  I think I've finally got something that could be used to actually make something though.

The green lines are separate sections and the red are different pieces within sections.

Photo reference behind all the lines.

Lines and photo overlayed with section guide.

Just the section guide so you can kind of see how you would put it together.

I don't quilt so that could end up being worth nothing, but it was good experience I think.  I did quite a bit of looking at other people's block designs to figure out how to section off a big, complicated piece.  It makes sense to start by slicing through the whole picture so I broke it up into 4 larger vertical pieces and then went from there.  I feel like I was losing my eye for figuring it out after a while.  I have some issues with the P and Q sections... can you make a smaller section and then use it as one of your number in another, larger section?... I think it could work, you'd end up cutting out your pattern multiple times though so maybe that's why people don't do it.  

I do want to try some of this soon but my own design would probably be an awful place to start.  It would be fun to do a lot of different characters and make a quilt of them.