This Looks Much Better.
Yes, this looks much better. The gold background makes the dragon and the birds pop. Yes; those are birds. Not particularly well drawn birds, but they don't look any worse than the original source.
As I wrote in my previous post, paper is cheap. I was not happy with the way the blue background was coming out and I was getting frustrated with not making it look that way I did in my brain.
There are certain stages to my scroll making, and "this look terrible" is one of the major ones, early on in the process. But the blue background never moved out of that stage. I reached a point where I knew I would never like the image. Now that the replacement is complete, I can see that I have chosen wisely. Now, I just have to get the proper wording and I can "calligraph" it.
My fellow scribes, all two of y'all who read this, keep this in mind: Start your assignments as soon as possible, so that when you are half way through and you hate it, you have plenty of time to start over.