Progress on Cousins

The Cousins piece is coming along. I have finally attached all the pieces permanently to a piece of nubby silk using fusible webbing. I cut the banjo picker from the group shot in Photoshop and fiddled with the color to make him a nice warm brown, then printed him out on muslin and cut him out. Since I forgot to put fusible webbing behind him before cutting him out, rather than mess up my iron, I attached him with some spray adhesive. I began to use some crayon and dilute acrylic paints to add color over parts of some of the images to tie them together. Stitching was added next with feather stitches used to add some pine boughs over the right top corner of the group shot and running stitches and french knots anchoring the edges of some of the pieces. I located some sheet music for the old folk ballad In the Pines recorded by Bill Monroe (and Nirvana, among others) and mirrored it before printing. I took the music to the photocopy machine and moved it back and forth while copying it to make it wavy, then using Goof Off spray transferred it to the top of the piece across the small images. Pine cone drawings were also copied and transferred using this method. I continued to work into the piece with a sepia Pitt Pen, adding shading to the pine cones, pine needles around the larger cone, and lyrics running throughout the piece. I am thinking this one still needs some work; some parts have too much contrast while others need a bit more. We'll see what else it begs me to do.