Birth of a complex murrini idea - bring on the tiger

For anyone who is even vaguely interested, this is how I plan my complex murrini.

I start off with an idea of an animal or object. I then ask myself "how will this apply to a bead and how can it be used". I need to consider if I will make a murrini that is complete unto itself (a complete picture like a swimming frog) or it is something like my monkey face murrini which I can apply then add a body. Some murrini like feather murrini are applied, left raised then raked with a thin stringer of glass. Others are designed to apply but leave raised then heated so that the sides pull in to form flower-like designs.

Once I know how I want my murrini to be used, then I do some research. I have a look at the real-life animal pictures and if possible/available any cartoon style pictures too. I usually print off a picture that really shows the colours and shapes, then do a pencil drawing of roughly what I want to produce. Once I have a look at the drawing I then break it down into some component parts to make individual canes (eg. eyes, nose, legs, body etc.)

I usually start with the eyes as my first point, I find that they sort of set the feel of the whole murrini when constructing later.

My latest plan is to make a tigers face. I reckon the good think about a tigers face is you can have it peeping out of the grassy savannah, can make a cool stripy body and put the head on. I will make sure that I leave a good sized piece of fairly thick cane, should I decide later to build a body and apply the head too - but in the meantime I will pull some smaller cane to use on beads (which require fairly small diameter slices, but not miniscule).

Tomorrow I will at least do the eye cane and maybe the ear canes. This tiger murrini will probably take a LOT of work but I will update as I go!