I’ve been enjoying reading fic written for this year’s SPNJ2BB when it caught my attention that this submission (A Little Bear and His Wolf) was accompanied by embroidered artwork by Meesasometimes.  What followed was a brain implosion that derailed all other projects.

First step, photo manipulation:

Here’s the base photo:

With a darkened background and addition of lighting and contrast.  I can’t tell you how long that took.  Let’s just say that Photoshop and I are not friends and leave it at that.

And then many and various attempts to manipulate color:

Nope.

Nope.

Eegads. Just, no.

Before settling on:

Finally!

On to putting it in fiber.

I ran into Lauren DiCioccio’s work while looking for inspiration.

All kinds of fun things happening with color and texture.  You can find more of her work here.

I thought I might give her approach of doing a segment at a time a try.

Rejected embroidery attempt #1:

Yuck. This attempt was printed on card stock fused to black silk.  I’ve rejected it for a variety of reasons, one of which is because it’s just flat and uninteresting without the variety of color DiCioccio uses, but also, so not worth the effort of trying to push a needle through cardboard.  

So, I scrapped that.  Found this product:  Silk inkjet printable fabric sheets 

Rejected embroidery attempt #2:

Completely forgot just how sheer silk is and promptly attempted fusing it to an underlying fabric to give it strength.  Ha!  No pictures of that failure.  There’s definitely a loss of definition when printing on fabric to begin with.  This just looked like I dropped it in a mud puddle.

So, on to my next attempt, which involved lots of very fine pins and a steady hand sewing the sheer printed charmeuse onto a more solid raw silk weave background.  

Looked around for other inspiration for embroidered portraits and rediscovered Cayce Zavaglia’s work:

Isn’t that gorgeous?  You can find more of her work here.

That led me to embroidery attempt #3, currently in process here:

Sam’ Blue Period

Zavaglia has a painterly approach to her work which I can in no way match.  I know absolutely nothing about using layers of color in that way.  My medium usually involves taking two dimensions and manipulating them into a third, like ceramics, silver-smithing/jewelry making, and many and various forms of fiber.  I suck at drawing and painting. My attempts are far too literal and bound to the concrete when I attempt to work in one set of dimensions to pull it off.

That said, I’m learning a ton about the kinds of stitches that work best to get the texture I want (a very loose and random herringbone, btw).  The glow of silk contrasted with how the stitching catches both light and shadow is growing on me. The material is a joy to work with.  I am also growing more confident in my ability to layer colors atop each other rather than relying on a paint by numbers kind of an approach.

My next challenge is to fill in a whole section with one base color and add other colors atop it to highlight and shade.  I think I’ll do that with Sam’s forehead.  It’s a smooth and broad enough plane to be rather forgiving, I think. 🙂

After I finish Sam, then I’m moving on to Dean.

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 The Red Mark

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.