A Bird's Eye View.

My explorations with maps seems to be going full circle, and has led me back to our feathered friends, the birds! I started to think about how they see the landscape below them, is it like looking at a map? I've enjoyed looking at the world below from a plane window, and to me it does seem a bit like that. I sketched a couple of bird outlines onto one of the pages from my old book of maps, and painted the surrounding area for contrast. 

I took some photos of my page, and then played around with the image in photo shop. I liked the result above, so printed it onto some canvas, ready for stitch.

The same treatment above, not so thrilled with this one, so I decided to stitch this one first, to see how it looked after. As you can see from the image below, it hasn't really worked, 

I prefer the back!

Another little bird sketched on a map, and photoshopped. I think I almost prefer them as they are, without the added stitching!

Next, I decided to print the swifts above, and my crow below onto a map page. The background for the swifts is very heavy, and you can't see any map showing, apart from in the outlines.

I photoshopped the crow, and really quite like this image, so decided to print this one onto canvas too. I'm really not sure about how to approach the stitching though, Hmm, I need to give these a bit more thought.

My final experiment so far. I Gelli printed onto a few map pages, and cut the crow above from a piece, you can still see the map showing through the paint, but I like the added texture. I've just placed it onto the map page, but it will be stuck down, once I've decided whether to paint the page or not! All these decisions....I think I'll need to sleep on them for a night or two!