WIP Wednesday: the dinosaurs are coming!

Well, they aren't coming very far to be perfectly honest.  I've been (and will continue to be) traveling a bunch, so Seymour has not yet fully materialized.

I did finish assembling (fusing but not sewing) the background, and I'm thrilled with how it turned out.  I almost feel like I should stop now, lest I ruin the whole thing.

The next step is to make the skeleton, and I've done some test bones to see how I want to proceed.  The "bone" fabric I'm using is some sort of pseudo-suede stuff I found a JoAnns.  It's a woven fabric though, so I guess it's not even really "real" pseudo-suede (is that even possible?).  It seems to ravel about like quilting cotton though, not nearly as bad as silk or organza, so that's a bonus.  My plan is to trace all the bones onto the fabric, add some shading, then fuse the fabric to fusible before cutting the bones out.

In an attempt to determine what would be the best thing to use for subtle shading, I made a test block. The red arrows show where I shaded with different colored crayons, the green arrows are "shading" with sharpie (less successful), and the blue arrows are shading with colored pencil.

I was going to go with the colored pencil as I thought it gave a pretty nice subtle look, but then my mom suggested India ink.  She's just come back from a class with the fabulous Betty Busby, and apparently that's one of the things she uses for shading faces.  So I got a bottle, diluted a little bit, and applied it to another test bone.  I definitely prefer the look of the ink, so I'm glad I tried it out!

Up next, actually tracing and shading all the bones.  Could take a while, there are a bunch of them!  Linking up with Lee as usual!  Hope you guys are having fun and making progress on your WIPs!