Paint & stitch tree

Another birthday, another paint and stitch card, this one was made for my brother. He recently bought a piece of woodland, so I made him a tree. You may have seen this card before as it’s the one I used to illustrate the process blog post.

So far all of my paint and stitch cards have been based on other people’s line drawings (apart from Beaker who I adapted from a screen grab). I drew this one from scratch without a reference image to work from.

It’s only a single tree, but that left nowhere to hide, I had to create a design that I was happy with. I started with a rough pencil sketch, then added black outlines. As I was adding some shading to get a feel for how the painted tree might look, I also tweaked some of the top sections. Then I realised that it was becoming a little fussy, so I simplified some of the areas. I transferred the final design onto tracing paper with black pen and used that to transfer it onto the fabric.

The rest of the process was essentially the same as for the previous paint and stitch cards: add colour with fabric paint and outline the sections with black thread. I also added some green line stitching to hint at volume within the tree sections. The final touch was to add the birds, which I drew on with pen as that looked better than my attempts at creating them with thread…

For once I actually got feedback on one of my brother’s birthday cards — he really liked it — but that was only because he had come down to visit the day after his birthday and I kept the card to hand to him rather than trust it to the post.

If you are interested in learning more about the work that goes into creating these cards, take a look at my write-up of the paint & stitch card process.