Tag: Animal Vignettes
Starting More Animal Vignettes
Since I’ve decided to start on the animal vignettes for the Vision of Placidus, I’ve been making a hay while the sun shines, thinking of animals I want to include and finding picture sources. I do need to re-read the book to make sure I don’t miss out a critical element, but with Aethelflaed, Rahere, and the Lady Julian all swirling around in my head, a lot of research is also swirling around a bit, making it hard to keep things in order. However, while I have the gauze mounted on frames, I might as well keep going.
So here we have a fawn and a rabbit. The drawing is maybe not quite the success of the brockis, but it’s all so much stronger than it would have been two or three years ago that I’m taking merely the doing of the drawing as a huge success. I’ll probably keep on going on about this. At school, not only did I have no discernible skill with pencil and pen, I could make a biro blotch just by taking it in my hand. I’ve only really started to work on my drawing skills since late 2018, so when it works I’m almost indecently thrilled!
The sketches are side by size on the gauze, so I started thinking about them and working on them at the same time.
I probably won’t continue to give you quite such close ups, but I wanted to emphasise a few things about how this is beginning to come together in my head. The Medieval Movers and Shakers (William Marshall, Aethelflaed, Rahere, and Lady Julian) are going to be fairly strictly constrained to true Opus Anglicanum, split stitch and underside couching, and I will do that joyfully because it is part of my conception of them.
However – as I believe I may have said before! – my true love in embroidery is in playing with the texture and intricacy of thread and stitch. Even though it’s going to be a huge piece – I’m intending it to be five foot by four, at least – I want it to live and breathe my enthusiasm, in every detail and however closely you look at it. Each ear of these two has something slightly different about the fall of light and the way the lines and edges show, so I’ve tackled them slightly differently.
I’ve learnt from Mus’ Renard, and for now I’m using a single strand of stranded cotton (a Stef Francis variegated one, since you ask). I’ve used crossed blanket stitch in some places, because that gives me a thin line of the pinky-orange in a distinct area. And in the larger one of the two ears of the rabbit, I started with some fly stitches overlying each other. That gives some little shadows and helps everything come together with varying degrees of coverage.
Already this has changed from the Hawk, who was all in satin stitch to cover the gauze. I’m not trying to cover the gauze completely anymore – I’m already quite happy to allow the back to show through, just a little.
Mus’ Renard, Mus’ Renard…
This getting started on the animal vignettes seems to be working, for the moment.
I found a lovely picture of a fox staring straight out of the picture, so I’ve gathered russets and browns for this one. He’s awkwardly sized – maybe too big, when I finally get to the assembly of the panel – and I kept changing from one to two strands of stranded cotton and not being happy with either.
The half stage shows – rather blurrily, unfortunately – that I’ve used blue for the white-in-shadow. It’s amazing how often white does, genuinely, look blue or purple, but in any case, it helps to “lift” the general effect. When you’re mixing colours in painting, you can get lovely blacks and greys which have shades of other colours in them, and aren’t as deadening as straight lamp black would be. In embroidery, as I’ve said before, flat black has a tendency to unbalance a design, and in truth a lot of the greys aren’t much better. You might recall I turned Akhenaten’s black wig blue...!
Well, the gauze really does vanish under light, doesn’t it!
Some of the stitches had to be woven into to shorten the length of the colour on display, and I’m not as happy with Mus’ Renard as I was with the Brockis. But he looks much better from the distance that he’ll be viewed from than he does in analytical close up, and I have to regard at least some of these as studies for the final piece, rather than necessarily parts of that finished piece.
We’ll just have to wait and see…
Working on the Brockis
You may or may not be able to see that there’s a drop-shadow effect in these photos – I learned from the mistake of the hawk, as I mentioned, and mounted the green gauze on a frame before I started. I rather like the result when I set it down for photography, and it gives you a much better sense of the view I got as I stitched.
Ordinarily, I would be very concerned about working on gauze – the hawk is virtually satin stitch to ensure there’s nothing grinning through the gaps – but I have a feeling that this is going to evolve as I work on it. Regular readers will know by now that if I’ve convinced myself that something is necessary for the effect I want to achieve, I grit my teeth and do it, even if I don’t think I’ll enjoy it – although by the alchemy of Achieving What I Aimed For, it’s amazing how often I do in fact enjoy it!
My brockis is going to be peering out at the main scene from behind a tree, so he’s going to be on the ground, in amongst the undergrowth, and probably backed by darkish fabric and stitch. That being the case, gaps in the stitching might in fact enhance the sense of depth in the whole assembly. I want him to have rather rough fur, so he’s not going to be satin stitch, is he?
So my brockis is made, again, purely freehand, referring to the photo for guidance, but simply in layers of stitching. I’ve used silk, cotton, and linen threads, and a tangle of Vandyke stitch, Cretan Stitch, feather stitch and alternating twisted chain stitch. The silk came from the same stash as the silk I used for the hawk, the linen is a Stef Francis yarn I bought for the Dreams of Amarna that never quite worked in any of the projects, and the cotton is ordinary stranded cotton, but only single strands.
I’m rather pleased with him.
Another observing animal for Placidus
Elizabeth Goudge’s book “The Herb of Grace”, which gave me the idea for Placidus, is set in a pilgrim inn near to some ancient woodland, and in her writing she regards the trees and animals of that woodland as very much part of the world the family inhabits. She wouldn’t, I’m sure, have considered herself an environmentalist, but only because she probably couldn’t imagine considering herself as other than part of the natural world. Certainly the fictional fresco maker she imagines would have done so.
My reboot over the period between Christmas and Epiphany has suggested that since I want to have a welter of animals observing the scene, maybe I should just start on them. Once I have enough to make a start, that might help me with the trees, the rocks, and the stream. Then Placidus with his horse and hounds, and the stag will have somewhere for their drama to take place.
It was the Herb of Grace that told me of the word “brockis” as an old name for a badger, and over on Patreon, the writer Anne Louise Avery has a character she calls “Grey Brock”, whose adventures are often illustrated with a photo of a badger paying very close attention. I’ve used that photo as my starting point, and sketched my brockis on some green gauze (on a frame, this time!) using a white gel pen.
And can we just pause there to celebrate the fact that I sketched this, freehand, on a difficult surface with an indelible pen, and ended up with a recognisable badger? Even last year, I don’t think I’d have managed it!
The animals are going to be quite experimental, I think. Certainly there won’t be a lot of long and short stitch. I want a lot of rough and ready texture and an excuse to experiment.
So the first layer of my brockis is actually vandyke stitch in a middling creamy beige that will help, I hope, to create some depth in his fur.
Hawk in a clear blue sky…
A good, optimistic start to the creative year, here, with my first bit of stitching for Placidus – who’s only been in the planning stage for a decade or so!
You will see from the progress pictures that I was absolutely rocketing along the edge of catastrophe curve here, very little planning, and just alternating staring at my source and stitching. This is the way I tackled Ankhsenspaaten, and a few other pieces, and it’s very much the way I prefer to paint. But it’s highly uncertain as to success, and I may come back in a few years and try again.
Clicking through will show you how little guidance I’d put on the gauze, and how little it showed once there. Furthermore, I was in such a fever of impatience to start that I used neither frame nor hoop, working in the hand instead. I won’t do that again.
(Until next time I do it..)
I’ve mostly used silk perle, which is lovely, and the particular bundles I’m using I’ve had in my stash for decades. I use it, but it’s quite fine, and until recently I’ve preferred to work with rather more solid materials. We also discovered, when my grandfather’s carer boil washed a tray cloth I’d embroidered for him, that the colours aren’t washfast. Not a problem in this case: a panel hanging on the wall, using a wild mix of materials, is unlikely to be boil washed unless by someone deliberately seeking to destroy it.
In the meantime, if it is to work in the eventual piece, it will need to be savagely blocked or pressed to get the crinkles out of it – not because my tension was tight, but because the stitching is filling up the spaces between the fabric threads and making them move and misbehave.
I don’t mind – I’ve already pinned it out, and I’m just so pleased to have made a start on the Vision of Placidus at last!
Update: I showed this to The Australian, who immediately started singing the Hawthorn team song (Australian rules football). Go, Hawks!
Rebooted!
Having a Twixmas project has become part of my year for more than one reason. Firstly because usually I have to hide away my main project, as the table I work beside takes the Christmas tree. But secondly, and in some ways more importantly, it helps me “reboot” myself. Last year in particular, I ran out of “me” before I ran out of year, by quite a few weeks, and sitting quietly doing something I didn’t have to do any planning for turned out to be a proper reboot.
Because I’ve come up with ideas for making progress with Placidus, who’s been losing forward momentum for quite a while, as well as having ideas for another embroidered coat..
Placidus first. We’ve been remembering the description of the fresco in “The Herb of Grace”, and it’s slightly mad, the characters of Placidus, his horse and dogs, and the stag all a bit big and out of scale with the forest, and with little vignettes of animals in the spaces in the canopy.
Placidus had stalled because I’d got caught up in having the design planned out before I started. It’s going to be a big design, and for all my drawing and design skills have improved enormously over the years, a very taxin one. So, the reboot is to do what I did, in fact, with Amarna – start doing fragments that will be part of it, and worry about assembly when I get there.
Shortly after having that thought, I found myself watching a documentary in which Hamza Yassin was on the track of Britsh birds of prey, and remembered a bit of blue gauze I have in my stash.
Well, now.
So I started with pausing the documentary and taking a few photos of one of the hawks. Then I found the gauze and drew a very light outline in one corner of it. I’m going to be freestyling this one – part of continuing the reboot and reminding myself of my True Love in stitching.