This past week has been really busy for me, and besides that the only projects I’m working on at the moment are long and complex ones, so as a result I have no new work to post here. So I’m going to go back to the archives for something I came up with some time ago
I’ve always been intrigued by the sort of mosaic composition in which each square is a mini-picture all in itself. Here’s one example from my files. (I have no idea whose work this is – if anyone knows perhaps they could drop me a line so I can credit them properly) This isn’t really a good example of what I’m talking about, but you can see that it’s basically a large picture made up of an assemblage of small pictures
Mosaic design composed of smaller images
I thought this approach might make an interesting embroidery, so I sketched out a large, very simple bird shape, drew a grid over it and then drew little designs in each square, trying to make every little square an interesting composition in itself. When I stitched out the squares I used slightly different colours in each one, to emphasize the fact that each little square was a picture in itself, and so that the large shape of the bird wouldn’t be too obvious. Cherri Kincaid then stitched all the squares together to make one large panel
The Optical Bird
I think the results are interesting, mostly because the large shape of the bird isn’t too obvious. It takes the eye a while to make out the overall picture, and there’s a kind of balanced conflict between looking at the little individual squares and seeing the whole bird
For some reason this panel became known as the Optical Bird, and after spending some time looking at it, I’ve now begun an Optical Goat