visual decision making using a phone camera

I've been making slow progress on the snail series due to life throwing some troublesome things my way but I finally finished up the first two snails this week.

I started with a memory of a picture I took of a small yellow snail on the greenbelt gravel.  The color contrast was amazing and the tiny snail was crawling over relatively huge rocks but still making noticeable progress over the length of my daily walk.  But I also wanted to bring in some color using my marbled fabrics so I finished painting the first snail, picked out a good color of fabric and laid it all out with some stone-like fabric as the path.  And wow, the stones just didn't go with all the swirls so I ended up just using the marbled fabric.

So snail #1 is done.  Unfortunately, it's an odd size since I trimmed the background piece assuming there would be rocks on the bottom so it's 6 3/8" tall and 10.25 wide.  This will require some effort to frame it, if I decide to do that before posting it on etsy.

Thinking about the framing problem reminded me to make these design decisions before cutting.  (Plan twice, cut once.)  So for snail #2, I cut the background in a square after trying out the second, slightly darker snail against the background.  But which way to put the square? 

This is where the phone camera came in very useful.  I grabbed my phone and snapped shots of the snail against the 4 possible rotations of the background and then was able to look at them side by side.  This is much better than trying to visually remember the different orientations.  I tossed 2 out immediately and was left with these 2 possible layouts.

Final choice

The runner up orientation is below but sideways.  I apparently rotated the phone while taking the shot. 

As my year of experimentation continues, it's interesting to see how many ways I can simplify things with the right tool.  Now all I need to do is add the resin topcoat to #2 and post them to etsy.