This week’s fez is one of my spur of the moment designs. I brought my sketchbook to lunch on Monday and while waiting for my food I began sketching mermaid ideas. Turns out mermaids have been on my mind lately. I have been working on a velvet painting of my take on a mermaid for the Tiki Oasis art show in August. I should also point out that Tiki Oasis will have my favorite real live mermaid Marina the Fire Eating Mermaid in attendance. I actually have her show banner from last year painted by Thor hanging in our studio. So I felt obligated to finally put a mermaid to thread.
I decided to go with the “traditional” mermaid colors for this and play with textures to get the small details. The scales were an experiment that turned out surprisingly well.
Below you can see the tiny sketch that started this. I have a habit of drawing rather small sketches. In the end this is helpful for embroidery design since it helps keep me aware of the limitations of thread in rendering small detail. Next to the original sketch you can see a quick color study I did in Photoshop. This was used as the reference for building the embroidery. While many embroidery programs have an auto-trace function I don’t bother with them. They tend to produce the exact sort of results one would expect so I hand build my embroideries in the software for the most part.
This prototype is a 2X low profile on black velvet if anyone is interested in getting it. Our new Russet tassel is featured in the photo above. If there is interest in this design I could make a batch of them for sale in the future.
This week’s fez is one of my spur of the moment designs. I brought my sketchbook to lunch on Monday and while waiting for my food I began sketching mermaid ideas. Turns out mermaids have been on my mind lately. I have been working on a velvet painting of my take on a mermaid for the Tiki Oasis art show in August. I should also point out that Tiki Oasis will have my favorite real live mermaid Marina the Fire Eating Mermaid in attendance. I actually have her show banner from last year painted by Thor hanging in our studio. So I felt obligated to finally put a mermaid to thread.
I decided to go with the “traditional” mermaid colors for this and play with textures to get the small details. The scales were an experiment that turned out surprisingly well.
Below you can see the tiny sketch that started this. I have a habit of drawing rather small sketches. In the end this is helpful for embroidery design since it helps keep me aware of the limitations of thread in rendering small detail. Next to the original sketch you can see a quick color study I did in Photoshop. This was used as the reference for building the embroidery. While many embroidery programs have an auto-trace function I don’t bother with them. They tend to produce the exact sort of results one would expect so I hand build my embroideries in the software for the most part.
This prototype is a 2X low profile on black velvet if anyone is interested in getting it. Our new Russet tassel is featured in the photo above. If there is interest in this design I could make a batch of them for sale in the future.