Meet the Hummingbird

My challenge piece is coming along and almost done; it feels good to have some time to play in my studio and work on something I'm excited about. For this piece, I dyed the background to give it a mottled look. I added some Dye-na-Flow silk paint to the edges and bottom to darken it. It's was watered down so just a wash. After the Dye-na-Flow dried, I went back and added some peachy colored paint to tie in the flowers to the background.

I often dye my fabric for quilts but couldn't get a good peach color so resorted to commercial fabric and found some good ones in different values.
The flowers were shaded with Shiva paintstiks, another fun thing to use. They are oil sticks formed to look like a large crayon. I use a tiny stencil brush to apply the color where I want it. The paintstiks are oil based so they take a little more time to dry, but permanent on fabric once they are air cured.
These are the two I used for the flowers. I mixed them together by coloring one on an index card and then the other color on top. That became my "paint palette" to use with the stencil brush.
And the leaf fabric, I did dye a grayish-brown enhanced with Shiva paintstiks.
And on to the Hummingbird....I found an image in free clipart on the internet. I admit to not being able to draw my way out of a paper bag, so I rely on my son or Dover coloring books with copyrite free images or the internet. The wings on this little guy were made with Angelina fibers which are translucent so I enhanced them further with Shiva paintstiks. She needed more color in the throat area, so I used paintstiks here also.

And here she/he is.