This one is my favorite.

I pretty much knew I wanted this screen cap and that the theme color would be red.  I mean, how could it not be?  The RED mark and all.

I started off with the screen cap:

Played around with photoshop until I had the base I wanted:

And then red… red… how to use red:

Interesting, but where exactly am I focusing the threadwork.  Alright, trying the opposite:

Innnnteresting.  Not quite right though.  Let’s try making the colors a little cooler.

HOLY MOTHER OF GOD!

Wow, yeah, that was it.

Look.  I mean seriously, look at this part:

Look at all that depth of color!  And incredibly intimidating. Unlike the Contemplation photo where the ideas preceded the image, the image preceded the ideas. How the heck was I going to do this?  

I did some trials.  I wanted to get that sense of depth, so I laid down a layer of small, random-y cross stitches.

and then a layer of thinly placed straight stitches over it.  

Okay, okay.  So far so good, maybe I can do this.  Here we go.

Working on the plaid while I could think some more about what colors I wanted in the lighter spaces.

Tackle the face. Teeny tiny stitches.

I used the blue thread as a guide to guide the straight stitches.

Okay, take a deep breath.  Time do do the over layer.  BTW: it cracks me up that the primary red I used was this color:

This is an earlier version.  You can get now why I ripped it out and worked on the face instead of proceeding. Needed some time to think about it.  The straight stitches were just covering up all that glorious cross-stitched color.

Plus, something was bothering me.  The literal translation of the color was working well.  But something was lacking.   The color was gorgeous but the picture wasn’t SAYING anything.  So I bugged meesasometimes and basically just vomited my concerns all over her.  You know how a beta can sometimes just say something and it sparks an explosion of thought?  That happened.  She said that she could see how the plaid would need straight stitches, but the rest of it wouldn’t.  AHA!  I had been so focused on the image and not the idea that I’d pinned myself into a corner.

I knew I wanted to give the impression of being stretched and pulled to the point of snapping.  You ever see ferrofluid and it’s effect under a magnetic pull?

THAT’s what I wanted.  That lead to a trial in photoshop.

I took the plunge.  Here we go:

I liked what was happening, but it needed a greater degree of contrast of color to give  sense of depth and more randomness.  After much dint of adding lighter colors underneath and adding and clipping out too many dark ones on top, this is the final version. 

That… went surprisingly well.  Dang.  

It was the last piece I tackled. I saved it for last because of how intimidating it felt. I figured I’d need the skill development before I got to this one.  

Here it is getting ready for photographing.

I got some really good advice from bflyw about camera settings and setup for photographing something that’s so dark. Apparently your automatic settings assume that nothing could possibly be that dark, so it ends up overexposing the image.  I played with the manual settings to underexpose the image as she suggested and got more strategic about reflecting light onto the surface of the work.

It made the difference between this:

and this:

High resolution versions of The Red Mark and the other artwork can be found on imgur.

The diary for Contemplation can be found here.

Here’s the diary for Sam’s Blue Period.

And the diary for Embrace.

Chickcheney wrote a lovely series of vignettes that do a wonderful job of capturing the emotions I was trying to portray.  Where I built on a base of images directly taken from the show and added thread to evoke a mix of tension, horror, helplessness, sadness, and longing, she did something very parallel to that with words.  She took the events toward the end of season 9 and added to the narrative so that it emphasized that complex interplay of emotions.  The story she tells is very evocative.  Go read it.