Sweet River Studios

I'm almost finished with the animal portraits and in between I've been thinking about how to enhance them with quilting or thread painting. I decided to start with the Hyacinth Macaw first. He's a pretty iridescent bird and I'm sure my embroidery thread will help out the picture a lot. I have to be really careful though. The more I thread paint the picture the more likely I'll over do it and it will distort the fabric. I started with the darkest blue areas and gave them direction. Next, I worked with medium blue thread and finally a light blue for the lightest areas. The only thing you have to remember is to blend the colors. You don't want to just stop in the blue area you in if it goes into another shade either light or dark. You want your threads to criss cross into other areas and that way when you look at the over all picture it'll look nice and blended together. Otherwise, you'll have areas that just have hard stops so to speak. The ...

The next animal I'm working on is the Kakapo. This endangered little parrot is just too cute and I thought that since he doesn't have a great deal of detail that he would be another good one to start painting. I forgot to take a picture of the line drawing first but believe me you didn't miss anything. It just looked like a fat weird bowling pin shape with eyes and a beak. This bird is full of greens and yellow. I started with the brightest green color and roughly laying it in avoiding the bright yellow chest and head. Then I added the yellow areas and blending that into the green. Next, I layered some dark green and a greenish brown color to shade some of the beak area. I let this dry for several hours. Next, I added background colors. This little parrot likes to walk on the forest floor so the background is an abstract of greens and browns. After a while, I thought some leaf shapes would look good peaking in from the sides and so I added those.  In the sec...