I haven’t been working much on the cat portrait recently, so progress has been slow. I’ve been getting a bit burned out by work and generally exhausted and anxious. Sometimes embroidery helps with that but this is a tricky project and I get better results if I approach it with the right mindset.
In fact I’ve been getting anxious about it because I’ve never attempted anything like this before and my skills might not quite meet my expectations!
Valentine especially is difficult because her fur is mostly black and I found that there are next to no dark grey shades available to help me give her dimension. In fact the darkest dark grey is lighter than I’d like. So I’m going to have to be extra careful with the direction of my stitches.
I Googled embroidery portraits of black cats to get some ideas for ways to tackle it, since the course I took only covered a chocolate brown dog!
I actually already unpicked most of what I originally did on her cheeks and restitched. That took an extra hour or two but it does look much better now. Unfortunately I didn’t think to take before and after photos for the blog!
I made a lot of headway today at last. I decided to take the afternoon to try to relax and work on it. The progress I made is approx 6 hours. I watched a bunch of New Girl episodes, Deadpool and 21 Jump Street. I now associate Valentines right eye area with X Gon’ Give It To Ya.
I think I’ve got back into the swing of it now. I’m finding it more helpful to lay down some directional stitches to guide me rather than trying to do it on the fly.
Still a long way to go!
