Kestrel for Julia

One friendship group I belong to has been working on an exchange of sorts for the last several months. Each person in the group provides fabric to the other members with some guidelines for making a block for that person. Recently I have been working on a block for Julia. She provided us with a floral fabric with a black background and a solid pale yellow fabric. She wanted us to make a 12-1/2 inch square for her, any design, adding two additional fabrics. Julia is a good friend of mine and we have shared stories about birds that nest in our yards for years. She has a pair of Kestrel hawks that nest near her yard every year. She has told me stories about the baby Kestrels flying into her garage and their other misadventures. I decided to make her block with a baby Kestrel as the main event.

Here is the finished block. I added some hexagons because that is another of Julia's favorites. Those were my first ever hexagons!!!

To paint the Kestrel I took a photo I had of a baby Kestrel and traced its outlines onto the yellow fabric. Then I put some "No Flow" over the area to be  painted to prevent bleeding of the paints in the fabric. Here is the drawing on yellow and a photo of the No Flow product I used.

I painted most of the bird with Tsukeniko Inks mixed with textile medium. The bird was floating in mid air so I decided to "ground it" by adding a tree stump. Here  is the bird about 2/3 done with the stump drawn in.

Here is a close up of the stump. Sorry the focus in the photo isn't better. My bad!!!

Here is a close up of the finished bird and stump. I took some liberties with the colors so the bird matched the floral fabric.  I used Inktense pencils to add the darkest values at the end.

I hope you like it and thanks for visiting my blog!