Backyard Bushtits #1 finally finished

I've obviously been trying to go faster than my body wants, as I'm struggling with a cold in addition to the surgery recovery so it's taken me quite some time to finish up Backyard Bushtits #1. BUT, it's done, finished, even ready to hang and it will be put on my etsy store sometime next week.

I learned a lot from doing this work in a series and I'll post later about the rest of the pieces as they finish up. Right now there are 4 of them. I've put the word "LESSON" in caps throughout my post for the things I've learned.

Here's the photo I started with. The bushtits travel in large flocks, up to a couple of dozen little birds, and they tumble across backyards here in western washington. (Probably elsewhere, but I'm not motivated enough right now to go look up their range map. I leave it as an exercise for the reader.) I really liked the way the four of them looked like a puppy pile so I snapped the photo through the greenhouse window in my kitchen and played with it in adobe until I had it cropped to a pleasing composition. LESSON #1: my technique of cutting up photos and doing a textile collage with them works better when I don't start with a good composition. It's much harder to create one that's different from the photo when I like the photo just fine to start with.




Here's the top without much done to it. I was not happy with it, and did a little in the way of paintstiks and stamps to try and rescue it with varying the colors and tones a bit. LESSON #2: remember the one rule (vary all intervals) from the beginning. The photo has more contrast and variation than the fabric printed version of the photo and I ended up having to add that back in. When it prints on the fabric and loses all the variation in color/tone that it had to start with, maybe it's time to switch to another photo or idea. It's not like I have a shortage of them, anyway....





Then I did more surface design work on it, and quilted it lightly, then put it on stretcher bars. I'm okay with how it looks, altho the composition is still more static than I like. LESSON #3: Get the composition right to begin with, improv work can go on top of a good composition but can't correct one I don't like to start with. LESSON #4: don't put the batting all the way out to the edge of the fabric for stretcher bars. I don't like the bulk on the sides and corners when I wrap the fabric around with the batting going all the way to the edges. We'll see if I can get this one better on #2 which is now in the quilting phase and should be finished before Monday.



I'll just point out that the yellow added to the birds shows up much stronger in the photo than it does in person. I'll have to play with the photography before I list this piece on my etsy store. I'm not entirely sure it's fixable as part of the problem is the reflective quality of the silk I printed the photo on. The other possibility is that the watercolor pencils I used reflect differently enough that they will always pop out visually in a photo. We'll have to see...