Nature loves camouflage. A great deal of nature is brown. Brown isn’t necessarily boring, but it does have a way to go to be showy.

There are tricks for that. All brown is made up of complementary mixes. Red and green make brown. Yellow and purple make brown. The cool thing about it is that they don’t make the same browns. Although any complementary pair you choose is essentially a primary color and a secondary color, everything is made from the primaries themselves. Every brown is made of yellow, red, and blue. But the mixes aren’t quite the same and the glory is in the details.

So we can mix brown with thread, as easily as we could mix it with paint.

But past that. brown shows up as neutral. Which means it hasn’t much impact. So what can we do to add interest? Add texture.

I’ve worked on bird feathers for a couple of years now. It’s kind of a quest. In the same way there are stipple patterns, there are shading patterns. I’m working on those to try to create the different feathers on birds.

Every bird has different kinds of feathers for different reasons. Pinions to support flight. Fluff for warmth. Tiny feathers that cover skin. They are very different in texture.

This is a texture for the fluff feather I’m trying out here. It’s a different shape that gives us the feather feeling.

I’m also using a long/short stitch as a fill-in for the breast. It fills in with different colors, giving a bird that stripey look.

The feet are done with three colors of threads in an uneven grid.

Finally, to crisp up the image, I outlined it in a bright cream.

After all of that, the birds are still brown. But the heads sort of fixed that for me. They really are that blue. How cool is that!