I always enjoy looking at the “statistics” report of this blog to see where visitors come from, and what brought them here in the first place. Most people arrive after doing a search for things that I talk about – for example recently we’ve had a lot of visitors looking for “Zentangle Animals”. However the other day I came across an unusual search – someone had been looking for “Cubist Birds”. I’ve never written about cubist birds, but I do mention Cubism a couple of times and of course there are lots of birds, so Google had just put them together. But then I started thinking about what a cubist bird would look like, and I even did a Google search myself, which didn’t turn up anything interesting. So then I tried a couple of sketches. The style of the first two looked nothing like cubism – I’m finding it more and more difficult to imitate other styles. They might make interesting embroideries eventually, but they’re definitely not cubist.
Two non-Cubist birds (the printing is just because I use scrap paper for sketching)
The third attempt was a bit better so I digitised it and stitched it out.
The sketch for the cubist bird…
…and the first version of the embroidery
The colours aren’t right and it would be better with a painted background. But now if that visitor ever comes back they might find something a bit more interesting to look at
However – somehow I like the sketch better than the embroidery. Clearly there's more work to be done on this