Next in queue- "Notwithstanding, my heart to eat"

Next flat, square-ish miniature tapestry in queue. The Cartoon process (for my non-tapestry weaving friends being directed here from elsewhere in the web).

This is a fairly typical process for me, as I currently have no light-table or any better image manipulation program than MSPaint (we're working on that too).


The original rough sketch in my "Inspiration book", roughly done, just enough to remember the image I had in my head.


Since I kind of suck at sketching, and really, realistic birds are beyond my limited abilities, I went searching on-line for images of ravens in more or less the pose I wanted. I'm not going to post the original photo here, as it is someone's copyrighted image.

This what it looked like after I spent a few days "cartoon-izing" it. Colour gradations were simplified, colours in each section of the cartoon are all one of the colours that pixels in that section really were. Some manipulations of lines were also done, in places where I could see following the actual lines would cause problems in weaving the piece.


The hand is the same one I used in "The Marriage of Sir Gawaine". It was cartoon-ized from the hand in panel 5 of The Hunt of the Unicorn series of tapestries (c 1500 CE), "The Unicorn is Tamed by the Maiden".


This is the cartoon with colour, as I had originally conceived the piece. I was never able to get the blood drops in the rough sketch to look right.


This is the working cartoon.

However, after looking at it a couple days, I decided first, it was kind of boring, and second, the raven might be a bit too complicated and finicky for a miniature, at my current skill and patience level.


Then I was inspired, primarily by a number of contacts in Flickr who do beautiful image layering in their photographs (McNeney, Daniel Colvin, Teodoratan, Anke Merzbach), with an idea. So I simplified the cartoon...


took the head from "A mon seul désir", in The Lady and the Unicorn series of tapestries (c. 1500 CE)...


cartoonized it...


simplified it...


and layered it under the image of the raven.

Sadly, MSPaint doesn't have a function that would allow me to colour it to show what the final piece is supposed to look like. The raven and hand will be solid images, as in the above colour cartoon, though simplified. The face will be done using the transparency technique I used with the ghost images in As Demented Spectres Dance.