Zigzag Skin

As you can see, I have been busy. The mermaid tails have their beads (fewer on the background mermaid as she is further away and smaller, so needs to be less prominent), the small background, dog has his outlining and mouth, and I've started the hair of the bleached blonde mermaid in the center of the canvas.

I didn't finish last night--she needs longer hair in back--but I stopped where I did and left a thread hanging to point out the zigzag look of the blonde's face where it meets the bar. I didn't notice this until it was pointed out to me, probably because I was obsessing with the zigzag look of the arm of the mermaid in the background.

I fixed the smaller mermaid's arm by just doing a small \ with only 2 plies of silk (I used 4 plies for the arm stitches in the beginning) on top of the dark background tent stitches that looked like they needed smoothing out. Usually that is enough to at least convey the illusion of a smooth arm. Sometimes you can add one more tent stitch in the zigzag but that didn't seem to work in this case as the arm is too small. Another tent stitch made it too fat for the rest of the figure. UPDATE: If you want to compare the zigzag arm on the little mermaid now to my earlier attempt, look at the image in the August 9th Preparing for the Hairdresser entry below.

The larger mermaid's face also has this problem but I'm going to see if I can fix it another way. I'm going to put strands of blonde hair (this is Vineyard Silk, remember?) along her face. That's why the strand of "blonde" Vineyard Silk is hanging beside her face. That's my starting point. Well, it might be the finishing point. I'm not sure yet. I just pulled the thread through to show you the area I was speaking about. Some folks are really bothered by the zigzag effect on faces but there are several ways to adjust tent stitches to minimize the effect. You can't always get rid of it completely (like the mermaid arm, which is not completely smooth) but you can make it a lot less noticable.

We'll see tonight how it looks.

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow