Still working on that border!

I continue to wrestle with the arrangement of broom and dog roses – my goodness, am I ever glad I’ve been working on planning with paint over the last two years or so! I do some exploration with digital images, but as it often results in a sore arm from mouse and trackpad manipulation, painting is a much better option. This selection of straight sprigs could be assembled into corner decorations, and potentially tweaked in size to fill a side or leave space for the Templar crosses.

Indeed, I have painted so many straight sprigs and corner designs – so large, to make it easier to paint – that I’ve become quite blind and jaded with them, and can’t decide which I like. I did realise that I needed to put them against William and the chateau de Tancaville, so I photographed them and printed them out. And then told the printer to try something smaller and go again.

The embroidery of William Marshall, with paper cutouts of various sprig designs. Decisions are not proving easy!

And that showed that those sprigs would have to be, if anything, even smaller than I had anticipated.

This tells me that I will have to be very much more careful about the colours I use, and the number of strands. I can’t afford to produce a border that looks muddy or confused, but equally, it mustn’t fight with William or his underside couched golden sky.

Tricky. Very tricky.

7 Comments

  1. Sue Jones says:

    Yes most of those ar much too large. I think you want to formalise the a bit more than you have, also to reduce impact. Maybe eight evenly spaced roses around the border, the mid-point ones with two rose leaves and the corners with two gorse spigs so two ‘arms’ of the corners intersect with the rose leaves? If that’s still too spotty, maybe just coloured outlines for the rose and it’s leaves, and the gorse blossoms, not filled shapes? I can see you’re having lots of embroidery fun here! I am sure that you will get there in the end.

  2. Karen says:

    Very tricky. Good luck!

  3. Lin says:

    Yes, very tricky. I like the arrangement that includes the little crosses. xx

  4. Kathy says:

    I can see you’ve made more progress on Instagram. Isn’t it interesting how different it looks as embroidery onto the border. It has integrated very successfully with the background and shows much promise. I hope you are feeling encouraged 🙂

  5. Linda C says:

    Lovely paintings. I don’t know which I would pick either, very tricky.

  6. Amanda says:

    Good job on the auditioning. You’ll find the right balance I’m sure.

  7. Carolyn Foley says:

    Getting the scale right is always tricky but it looks good.