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.