Illustrator Revisited

I'm taking a ten-week adult learning class on picture framing and matting.  Most of my effort is with my photographs, but I thought that I might resurrect one of my Adobe Illustrator drawings from a few years back.

I took one of my favorite pysanky designs, the "piven," which is a stylized rooster.  This is it, in the front-right.

Going the extra mile, I touched up some of the rougher areas around the cock's comb and tail feathers.  The nicest effect that I tweaked was making the flower stems on the bottom look like they were passing through the scroll work of the "feet."  Previous attempts had the stems breaking at the junctures.  This left tiny gaps that you could see in the blown up image. This time, I copied portions of the scrolling and placed them in a layer over the flower stem.

When I mat this, I'm thinking of a couple of concentric rectangles.  Even the $2,000 mat cutters in class can't do oval cutting.  The inner quarter-inch mat would use the light green color from the picture, and the larger outer mat would use the reddish brick color.  Something about the way that this browser is rendering the artwork is making the brick color look like cherry-red.  I sure hope the final printed copy remains brick!