String padded goldwork

Taking a step back and wondering how I’m going to deal with the sky in this piece?

It occurred to me that ‘a sky’ won’t be enough.  It has to be a sky that is framed within something else somehow.  Because design-wise, the gold and silver will look too overbearing without something to balance them at the top of the image.

Luckily I can play with design problems such as this in my own mind and don’t have to be rummaging in my stash to find objects of inspiration.  Pinterest helps a lot, when I’m checking styles generally.  I also decided to cut out paper templates at the weekend and play around with a composition then.  Clearly this piece is turning out to be much more serious than I first planned and a real journey of discovery that has cheered me up so much during this weird time for the entire human race.

I decided I need to create a surface texture that pulls you in and also can look effective from a distance. So I decided to dig out my close-ups of a piece in the Ashmolean Museum.  I’m especially pleased now at the amount of detail I was able to capture at that resolution.  Reminds me to take that camera again.

For instance, you can see that when they did underside couching that little bits of the couching thread could still be seen.  Also look at the dark outlines, just like in later manuscripts.  They make it look like ‘anything you can draw: you can sew‘, which is incredibly inspiring...