Seymour's back!

Super late update today!  I hope you're all having a lovely Independence Day.  I've been working on Seymour some more lately, or rather Seymour's background, and wanted to give an update.

On a peripherally related note, when I was in Denver last weekend for my friend's wedding, my mom and I went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  It's really a great museum but the best part was that they had an assembled Coelophysis skeleton.  I took a bunch of pictures even though it was a little late for drafting Seymour.  

When last we left off, I'd finished the background for the front (below) and was talking about working on the skeleton.

After significantly more thought about the assembly process, however, I realized that I would need to piece the background and quilt the front and back together before putting on any foreground or dinosaur elements. So I set to work on the pattern for the back.  As you may recall, while the front (or really "side A" since he'll be fully reversible) will have Seymour's skeleton, the back will have him fleshed out.  Here's the pattern I used for the back ("side B").  I edited, enlarged, and printed it as I discussed here.

I assembled the back the same way as I did the front, basically cutting out pieces backed with fusible and pinning them up.  My guiding design aesthetic was that side A would be desert- characterized by light tints and warm colors and that side B would be jungle- characterized by dark shades, low contrast, and cool colors.  I started with the treetops, large trunk, and sky, then started filling in the background.

I got to this point and stopped because I didn't quite like the interface between the tree trunk and the background.  I wanted this side to be more blendy and low contrast than the other side, but it felt like the tree trunk was getting lost in the background.  I didn't have any more really dark fabric or any more solid looking fabric so I decided to wait until I had a chance to go fabric shopping.  My mom and I actually had a chance to visit some quilt stores when we were in the Denver area and I picked up a few great options.  I can't wait to swap them out to make the tree pop a bit more.

I'm really happy with how it's going so far, especially the trunk and trees.  I think the background still needs quite a bit of work though.

Linking up with Freshly Pieced as usual!