Playing around with collage

I can't remember if I posted about doing some paper collage recently. I was inspired by a couple of posts online, from a primary art class.
One here and one here being the main inspirations. But Pinterest does take you on a journey, suggesting endless other related links.

The idea is to put strips of paper radiating out from near the centre, then to look at the eyes and nose/beak of an animal and draw those, cut them out and put them on the collage. Voila: you have an image of an animal.

I tried it with mainly tissue paper. I was just doing a sample to show some young girls I was going to get to try this sort of art. I didn't take close notice of how to do the features and should have, my piece would have been a bit better. But I still like it.

I used the face of our dog as my inspiration. I didn't take the photo till afterwards, I probably would have put in a mouth if I had taken the time and done it in proper sequence. Not to worry, the girls and I had fun.

That was several weeks, if not months, ago.

I haven't done any fabric collage in this way - until this weekend.
Once again, I am trying to do the machine embroidery group's Farmyard theme and am struggling with it. The topic this month is Pigs.

After having it in the back of my mind for ages, and having looked online at lots of Pig images, especially pig collage images, I finally got around to trying it.

So far I have laid out the fabrics, adding very minimal eyes, nose and mouth.

I laid the fabrics, which are off-cuts from other projects, all very small, onto some adhesive interfacing and then ironed them on.

Then I cut out the shape of the head and added the features, rather haphazardly.

So far, so good. I went back to my inspirational image that I found on Pinterest, and decided that I needed to add some body.

Now I have to choose the background. I was originally thinking of doing a Pig in Clover and have tried two green backgrounds. The bright green does interesting things to the fabrics. The pale green is, well, pale.

Then I tried the linen and cotton background that I have used lately for other collages. I think that is the one I will use. Probably.  I am not going to try to do the clover bit - it was going to be free motion quilting but I think it is overkill. It will be quicker to just put on a plain background too.

There is still a fair bit of sewing to do, to put in some detail and to make sure the fabric pieces are really attached. The tilt of the head needs work too.

Actually, looking at the photos makes me see them differently and now I can't decide between the bright green or the duller linen-cotton fabric. That decision will have to come on another day.