Embroidered Collage

In addition to being a beautiful magazine, National Geographic is a very useful one for developing artistic skills and sparking imagination.  I sat down and went through a recent issue, May 2005, that I picked up at the library for a quarter.  I found some images to use for practice drawing and pasted them into my sketchbook, which you can go look at.  Here are a couple of the results.  The lizard head on the right was an attempt to duplicate and the one on the left was an attempt to fantasize.

 I also cut out a number of images as collage fodder, with the intent of playing, putting them together in some fashion on a surface in order to stretch myself.  And I did that actually, ending up with a chicken headed piano player.  I'm not sure the piece is done yet, but I'll post it when it is. 

And there were two very inspirational articles I removed almost in their entirety that will take me more time to work through.  One on some western scenery and one on underwater fish.  The latter has some great little square close-ups that would translate well into textures and embroidery samples that will end up having nothing to do the original images.  I might put that one away to work on later and just pull up a few more magazines and do some of the more basic exercises repeatedly.