Embroidered Collage

I'm still amazed that I reached the blobby figures in the atcs by beginning with snowflakes.  These three sketchbook pages show the progression.

 The first set of snowflakes is on tracing paper, created directly by tracing various feature from one snowflake in the book of micrographs.  Then I began looking at various features and trying those out.  The little line of figures on the second page was created by putting tracing paper over each spoke of the upper left snowflake, turning the circle into a line.  Then I tried enlarging them.  I did this again with another snowflake and then explored a different feature.  Wendy was most interested in the first set of figures, I imagine it was partially because they fit best into the afternoon's exercise of having a simple shape.  So I developed those further.  I like all the little arms but decided to work with the last one I drew where I pulled the arms into the body, at the upper right of the third page in this orientation.  I had intended to add the holes when I made the atcs, but never did follow up on that.

Working with tracing paper was more effective than I thought it would be.  Wendy pushed the technique to even greater lengths in her own sketchbooks, where she often had three or four layers of paper with various details and coloring overlaid on top of each other.