Friends' advice

I met with a couple of friends this week and asked their advice on how to put in my fish images for my swap card piece.

I had planned to use the swap cards I found in my album as the focus of the piece. Initially, I intended to recreate the actual cards. I was pleased that they were in a colour-way that I don't usually use - cool colours.
Then I decided that I needed more than three. I remembered that you often used to get packs of cards with the same image, just in different colour-ways. So I intended to make a couple of pieces that used the image in different colour ways.

With this in mind, I played around in Photoshop - not wanting to draw.

You can see the adjusted images. I hadn't thought to use exactly the colours of the copies, just to get an idea.

I had also thought to use the images at actual size. Then I realised that that was going to be very fiddly!

I decided to enlarge the images and hope that they would work.
Then I remembered that I have some old fabric that has fish on it. They were the perfect size for my new, enlarged images!!

I cut out some of the fabric (fussy cutting, which I don't like because it wastes so much fabric).

I laid out several designs and photographed them so I could get a distant perspective. But I couldn't decide on what worked.

Just a couple of the try-outs. 

I left it till the next day - which happened to be a day I was meeting with a couple of friends whose opinions I respect. I asked them what they thought of my choices. Their instant, independent but simultaneous, responses were to not put in the fish images.

So now I have sewn what was going to be the background, and may still be. It is not hugely inspiring in itself but I have been happy with the learning process.