The Wood Mouse

Since I want oak trees in both Placidus and The Golden Fleece, we took the opportunity over the summer to take a friend on an excursion to Sherwood Forest. Our friend likes going for walks, and I wanted to sketch oaks, it seemed a reasonable blending of interests.

And I did do a couple of sketches, and a watercolour sketch as well, but what I hadn’t expected was to see some rather bold and busy mice, scuttling about their lawful occasions with only the occasional wary eye on the big clumpy humans wandering around. So, definitely, there will be a wood mouse of some description in Placidus.

My photos all show a brown furry blob, so I went rummaging online for some suitable mice, and finally settled on a nice profile view that will make more sense when all you see is a nose and an ear. I started with single strands of stranded cotton, and then realised that, oddly, it wasn’t giving me the right sense of the fur, so I moved on to variegated silk perle. This is a bundle of thread I’ve had for years, and don’t use as much as I expected to. But when it’s the right thing to use, it’s very right!

The big beady eye went in first, as you see in the first picture, and then I just worked backwards and forwards, staring at my source photo, stitching a little, starting again, trying to paint with my needle. It’s not needlepainting in the classic sense, being neither as planned nor as careful, but it is very much bringing the way I paint into the way I stitch.

And there’s a thing I would never have said, thought, or attempted, before the “Dreams of Amarna”!

Ears, shadows, highlight on the eye, slightly blue shadow underneath. I’ve left the tail as a stub until I know where my little mousey will end up and whether the tail will need to show!