Dinosaur Panel Play 1

To review, I am trying to turn this panel:

Into a quilt for my now 7-week-old son, using my own ability to design on the fly and tips found in the book Panel Play by Barbara Becker (see my full mission statement here, written while I was still pregnant). To start out, I cut the panel apart and played with the overall layout of the feature fabric. First off, I tried a central panel, and four cornerstones:

This layout does put the most interesting element in the center, but it just *feels* aproportional to me. It also makes for a larger quilt than I'd intended (45 x 60 rather than 36 x 45 or so), and so I went ahead and tried some other things.

A "sidelights" look does emphasize the four-dinosaur panel more, And it *feels* more proportional than the first one (yay rule of 2/3!). But, I'm not into blocks in just one place, so the space between the brontosauras and the tyrannosaurus would need its own strong "pictorial" design element - and I didn't want to spend too long on complicated piecing or applique.

Removing another "side singleton" does give me more room to work with. But since the two spaces had different aspect ratios, I can't just do the same thing twice. I did spend some time brainstorming on this configuration, though, and added in some other fabrics.

To Be Continued In Dinosaur Panel Play 2...