The Long and short of it

The fourth square of my holiday piece is based on the magnificent bronze bull standing outside Birmingham's Bullring shopping centre.  It's clearly a popular attraction and I found I couldn't take a photo without including other tourists. 

The bronze bull complete with tourists

My original plan was to develop a design based on the whole bull but the size constraint of the finished square would not allow for the level of detail required.  Instead I concentrated on his head and started with a pencil drawing.  This looked a bit odd because the bull's head is at a slight angle so I squared it up for the basic design.  

The pencil drawing

The design was too complex for applique so I decided to use embroidery.  I played about with coloured pencils to plot the colours on another outline.    

The colours to be used 

Long and short stitch is often used for a 'painted' effect and I have tried it before but only in small try-out pieces so the next step was to practise the stitch and the graduation of colour. There's no photo of this step!

I'd selected some blue fabric for the background, transferred the image with a fine waterproof ink pen and finally started stitching.  I stitched the horns first starting with a button hole edging.  Initially I used 3 colours, cream, mid-brown and dark brown, the yellow was added at the end to keep the colours on the horns consistent with those on the bulls face.

Partway through stitching the forehead I found a rhythm, long and short stitch became more of an overlapping long stitch which was satisfying to sew and gave a good result.  I also used stem stitch for the strips of plain colour and for the dark outlines which were added at the end.  

My version of the Birmingham Bull, he is just over 3 inches across