So, despite finishing my Rue months ago, I totally forgot to take a picture and blog her 🙁 Well, here she is.
Better late than never.
Right, so, you might have noticed that she has no face. That’s a stylistic choice, I’ll have you know. Have you ever tried cross stitching a face? A tiny face? It’s not easy. In the end I gave up because it looked terrible. Foxface has a kind of vague hint of a face, I guess, but that too looked better on paper than on aida. Sorry, Rue. No face for you.
(She never saw that spear coming.)
(…too soon?)
Here is the usual list of pictures I used as reference or inspiration or just liked in general:
For the climbing pose I came across a good few stock photos on deviantart. Unfortunately, none of them were massively helpful to me :/ But I’ll list them in the name of being a Good Internet Citizen anyway.
Here are some Rues I found that weren’t horrifyingly morbid or mawkish! Yay! (Have you ever looked up Rue fanart? Seriously. Even in the ones I list below there are those that don’t know what 11 year olds look like. At least these fanartists read the books enough to know her race…)
I dunno, maybe I’m just really hard to please? I couldn’t find anything that really ~matched my vision~.
The mockingjays are my own. Irritatingly, Suzanne Collins doesn’t describe them enough to have a decent idea of what they look like. So I just looked up mockingbirds and blue jays and cobbled something together.
I will be the first to admit that I know nothing about American bird life, so at least the research was fun. Apparently, mockingbirds look like this, which was kind of disappointing. I mean, I had all these tree trunks and branches and Rue and everything was varying shades of brown, and then BOOM, mockingbirds are also brown. The only clue – the SINGULAR CLUE – Suzanne Collins gives is that the mockingjays have white patches on their wings, which seems to derive from the mockingbird.
Also, blue jays are way smaller than I thought they would be. These are the jays I’m familiar with (they’re actually related to crows, just… less gothy), about the size of jackdaws, as Wikipedia helpfully informs. I took a bit of liberty with the sizes of the mockingjays.
But yeah, I thought it would be unrealistic to breed a bright blue spy bird, so I decided to keep them brown, with a blue jay crest and elements of the blue jay “design”, as it were, with a kind of palette swap.
As for the font, it’s Paris from here, and I added the flowers myself.
COMING NEXT:
A Song Of Ice And Fire: the Tullys and the Greyjoys (maybe the Arryns if I get them done)