This is the forth in the series of endangered animals of Canada. There are way too many endangered species for me to do them all, but I have intentions of doing 3-4 more. It takes about a week to design the image, and about 2 months to weave the piece.
and how you isolated the motif for clarity!
Love the change in symmetry between tesselations. Are you working them by hand or with a program?
Thank you for viewing and writing!
I make the pattern using CorelDraw -- a graphics program. To start, I search for an image that looks like the prototypical (in this case) grizzly bear. I search books and the internet and maybe come up with 8-10 possibilities from the hundreds I view. I import them into CorelDraw, and make an outline sketch, which I can then manipulate -- re-size/rotate/mirror/duplicate/re-position -- at will. I tweek the sketch as required to make it into a tile that will fill the plane. Then I add the shading and features to this tile, and complete the pattern by manipulating copies of this tile into position on the grid. This takes many hours!
Bugs, birds, fish, reptiles are easier because they can be oriented upside down, but not so with bears -- so that was an added constraint.
You are right that the isolated bears help the viewer capture the image. I also felt that with no positive/negative space at all the pieces would be just too busy. And of course, the whole idea of the endangered species series is that these animals are disappearing ...
Bonnie.
Gosh, this is so cool on so many different levels. I hope you take time to submit this project/work to an exhibit or two when you are finished, to share with an even wider audience!
Your tapestries are quite lovely. I appreciate the description of your design process. Great designs, well woven, beautiful work, thank you for posting these.
