Pooh-Bah coming together..

Pooh-Bah is going to be difficult. I’m trying to Trust The Process here, since I’ve come up with a technique that seems to work, but the Chow’s fur is so different to the fur and feathers I’ve done so far that I’m not at all sure it’s going to make sense.

Besides, the technique makes enormous demands on my observation and imagination, both at once. Observation, because I have to see the details in my source photo that make the animal believable. Imagination, rather trickier, because my stitching is not using tiny dots of ink on paper, but relatively large stitches on fabric.

What my relatively large stitches have to do is to combine to create the effect of much smaller dots of colour, to create something lively – and alive – and yet definitely stitched. So as I’m stitching, I’m trying to arrive at an interaction of stitches and shadows that works.

This is not, yet, achieved.

But at least now I think I have enough in place that I have markers that I can work between. I’ve not got the proportions or the underlying shading quite right yet, and I’ve not quite worked out how to get the sense of the deep, fluffy fur.

But I do think Pooh-Bah will eventually approve my efforts!