A guideline from the culinary world is to pair meat with side dishes made from the food that the animal would have eaten. So in the same vein I wanted to include other motifs based on the diet of crickets. I saw that among other things they eat fungus, so bingo - crickets and mushrooms.
And finally, I pondered, what exactly is the difference between crickets and grasshoppers, in physical appearance? To me, the most noticeable was that crickets have much longer antennae. So I made sure to keep them nice and long in my drawings.
It was fun to do a much more free style of doodling for the fill patterns. I haven't done that for a long time. When I was done with the drawing, I remembered that the contest guidelines also stated that this was for a ditsy - so it needed to look good at a smaller scale. Once I shrunk it down, I decided adding in the highlights and lowlights on the "embroidery" as I did for the wizard's zodiac signs would be too busy, so I kept it to a very simple two colors.
This came in 37 out of 172 with 138 votes. My very favorite entry were these extremely cute cartoony crickets (which came in sixth). This was a close second in the cute category - not quite as cute, but more closely following the spirit of a true ditsy, rather than just being a general small-scale print. (Not that mine is really a ditsy either - everything is oriented vertically and all the mushrooms are the same way up.) Another favorite of mine was this soothing grouping with jasmine and ginkgo. On the more graphic side, a floral that activated my sticker-brain, and this scientific and slightly creepy scatter of parts.
Post script: I did some searching online to remind myself of traditional embroidery fill patterns. While doing so, I found this post showing examples of built-in stitches from a machine. It does little trees! And little turtles!! It's a good thing I don't own it or I'd probably have some crazy stitched border around the hem of every shirt I own.
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