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!

Starting Pooh-Bah the Chow

It’s been a while since I did any work on the Placidus panel, or more strictly, on the various elements thereof. It’s not for want of trying, but in my usual fashion, I became distracted by the Lotus Flower Coat. Now I’ve got that in the state where it’s awaiting assembly, I can return to my previous progress!

I am becoming aware that I have run out of “easy projects”. I need to start thinking about how I’m going to do the forest and the rocks, the stag, the man and his horse… At the moment, I’ve not the vaguest clue about that!

However, for Pooh-Bah the chow, I’m continuing as for the other animals I’ve done, with layers and layers of entangled stitching. I’m having to stitch myself painfully back into the right mindset to see what I need to see in my source material and then to bring it alive in my stitches. In this case, I’m scrambling in a light underlayer where I want the lighter coat, and I’m hoping that the final layer, in the direction of growth, will then look like the deep, fluffy fur of the animal.

There’s quite a lot more cream in place. More around the neck, short small stitches on the foreleg, trying to work myself back into my technique. It’s coming, I think. The foamy tail is looking suitably tangled here, and I’ve now added in a few dark stitches, the eye, ear, and start of the nose.