Daily Photo – Hawkeye

I titled this photo ‘Hawkeye’ for fairly obvious reasons, and also based on my assumption that this is some sort of bird of prey.

Again, this is a silk embroidery piece I photographed in Suzhou in 1991 so, again, probably in the Embroidery Research Institute. One key difference from the cat photo is that the artisan here is a man.

The process is the same for the cat photo – he’s copying a photo. What I particularly like in this image, and it’s also present in the cat photo, is the catchlight in the hawk’s eye. It’s a small touch but just adds a touch more realism. The sheen of the ‘feathers’ is helped by the silk threads of which quite a wide array of colors is being used by the artist.

I don’t recall how much they were selling these for back in 1991 but I do know that by my western European standards of the day, it was not much.

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