Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Autumn Leaves Starting Line Thoughts: The Paint Job


Before starting to stitch on Autumn Leaves, I want to talk a bit about painted canvas quality. Probably everyone here knows that the term “painted canvas” covers a wide area--from canvases that were computer printed or silk screened to hand painted or stitch-painted designs. So naturally the precision of the paint job depends on how a canvas was created. It is difficult for silk screened or computer printed canvases to go through the machinery perfectly straight, and NP canvas count isn’t always exactly so many threads per inch anyway. There is variation in the canvas, so the printed image put on it by machine isn’t going to be totally straight. Artists who don’t needlepoint themselves may do beautiful work but stitchers have problems trying to stitch a thin-lipped mouth, stitching something perfectly round, etc. Some areas may not be translatable into the NP grid. So a canvas painted by a real person is no guarantee that you won’t occasionally not know exactly what to do. “Stitch painted” canvases are created to avoid this problem. Each thread intersection is supposed to be totally covered in one color.

This may or may not matter to you, depending on your personality. Some folks are driven nuts by not knowing exactly where a line or color falls on a canvas. Some canvases’ hand painted lines are thicker or thinner according to how the brush was held, so some of the paint will not fall on a canvas intersection. It will be between a thread. How do you stitch that? How do you know where to put a red stitch when the red paint falls between two threads? If you look at the veins in the leaves above and also the edges, you’ll see that it isn’t always clear where to put the stitch for that dark line.

Actually, this is a really easy problem to handle. Give it your best guess, put in a stitch, put the canvas down and step back and look. Look ok? Then it is. Don’t like it? Pull it out and put that stitch in another location and check again.

I know some folks find this very annoying and simply don’t want to deal with a canvas that has an imprecise paint job. If you are one of these folks, ask your shop to help you discover which designers turn out stitch painted-canvases. If you limit your purchases to those, you will never have a problem. Everyone else should look very carefully at any painted canvas in good light before taking it home with you. Know the problems of that canvas first, then decide if it is the right design to spend your precious free time on.

However, this is advice easier to say than to follow. Everyone here has lost their heart to a canvas that wasn’t precisely painted. All I can tell you is to remember that needlepoint designs are not precise copies of images--they are artistic representations. You will not usually have a finished piece as detailed as a photograph. The eye of the viewer will put two and two together unconsciously and understand the image without thinking about it. Choose the thread intersection that looks best, try it, rip it out and redo if you don’t like the look, then keep stitching. Remember that you are holding your current project in your lap probably only a foot from your eyes. Once a project is framed or made up into a pillow, bystanders won’t see it up close like you do. You are going to notice problems more than regular passersby will.

We’ll talk more about deciding what color goes where as Autumn Leaves is stitched. The design falls on thread intersections fairly well as you can see in the close-up of the small red and tan leaves above, but there are curved veins where I’ll have to make a decision. And there are lines that are both thick and thin so I will have to decide whether to add stitches in that color to make a thicker line or not. When we get to a problem area, I’ll demonstrate how I proceed. Cleta, thanks for pointing out that this is something I needed to talk about!

P.S. Sorry it took so long for me to post the photo today. My home Internet connection kept cutting out on me and I was really REALLY busy at work today!