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 in my endangered species quilt is the Hyacinth Macaw. This beautiful bird is a rich, deep blue color and I was worried I wouldn't be able to capture it well with the inks I have. I have one bright blue color. That's it and I could see at least 4 shades of blue so I worried weather or not I'd be able to capture it correctly. I started with the background first. I think the blue bird intimidated me. I chose greens and yellows since they live in tropical areas and filled the areas with long streaking motions. I also filled in the tree limb with a shade of brown. Then I generally filled in the bird with blue color not really paying any attention to shades/highlighted areas. The pictures show more darker blues and even a deep purple blue on the bird as well as more tree limb definition. Then I added some highlights and yellow around the eye and bill. Now, I had a major problem. Gray from the beak bled into the yellow area and the yellow ink is...