More on the Barn Owl
I’m on to the next layer of stitching now, changing the granularity of the colours, changing the balance of colour, trying to really see what my source is showing me.
I’m not quite sure where this refusal to do detailed planning drawings has come from, but for these Animal Vignettes I simply don’t. Partly, I think, because once the first layer is in you can’t see the details you want in the second layer, partly because I have become engrossed, if you like, in the challenge. When it works, it can work phenomenally well, and even when it doesn’t, as Hebe Cox puts it in her book about embroidery design, it has the virtue of spontaneity!
The owl is proving quite tricky. I’m not seeing the shapes and their relationships as well as I might, and I’m struggling to get the colours nicely combined.
However, I am also being reminded that in this way of tackling my stitching, I expect not to get it right first time. There are iterations, tacking from my stitching to my source and back again. Staring, stitching, trying to analyse the image, find the shadows, find the highlights. In fact, treating each fragment rather like a painting en plein air. Well, I’ve said before that if I fall into any artistic tradition, I’m an impressionist!
I’m not at all sure about this one. I think it’s done as far as I care to take it at the moment, and it’s certainly much better than it was. The fine layer of stitching – single strands of stranded cotton in a tangle of feather stitches and fly stitches – has made a considerable improvement on the breast, providing a contrast with the wing and some of the stitched shadows under the body. But I’m not sure that it’s right, I’m not at all sure that it’s finished, and I may very well find myself doing a new version of the owl later on, either because it’s too big for where I want it to sit in the final piece, or because I decide it’s got too much wrong with it and will draw the eye.
But then, this whole project is partly inspired by a fifteenth century masterpiece, and the anatomical exactitude of fifteenth century animal representations isn’t exactly perfect, so maybe my flaws of observation will contribute positively to the atmosphere?
I don’t know how you view this bird, but to me he has a lot of charming ‘spunk’. He is looking right at me, his chest is swelling and he is flexing his claws.
I think you have done a grand job, Rachel.
This fine bird is very definitely a Barn Owl. I think you are worrying unduly. There’s a point below which you can’t go because of the medium. If you want to stick with cotton, that limit is one strand. Rayon and silk will go finer, but cotton is not strong enough. Polyester sewing thread is strong and matt, and available in lots of colours. It can be untwisted with care, but it’s a very unfriendly thread.
I agree with Sue. You have the head and the feet, you can fiddle with the feathers.