Embroidered Collage

  My favorite part of watercolor is the way it flows, so I wanted to make use of that effect in adding color to the sketches, but not the same for all of them. 

For the butterfly wing I wanted the color to spread wildly, so I worked primarily wet in wet from my pan watercolors.  I used the pans again, but with less water on the first sketch to get a more overlapping effect.

In contrast, I colored within the lines on the purple butterfly using watercolor crayons to make it easier to keep the flow to a minimum.  It seemed an appropriate approach to the more stylized design.  However, the end results on the purple and the rust butterflies were closer in appearance than I had expected.

Next step is, of course, stitching.

I started with lines on the first set of sketches, so I thought I'd also try the other way and start with color, building up shapes instead.  That would give me a different set of options when I reached the stitching stage, since there wouldn't already be prominent lines in the image.  I did get the effect I wanted on the two paintings that I tried, but they're so faint.  I need to build up the color intensity further somehow before I consider adding linework or stitching.