Digitizing Faces II Embroidery Project

After examining a real life subject, turn your attention to the artwork and apply the same process to it, while thinking about what you observed with the real face. It helps to make a copy of the artwork and actually hand-sketch in some embroidery details as you analyze the facial details.

Once you have identified the details, the next step is to determine how to recreate them with embroidery. This can be a serious challenge as embroidery is flat, while the human face is very dimensional. A photograph has depth of field, while embroidery does not. Thus, you must use shadows, shading and blending to achieve this look. For example, it’s not possible to raise the nose, so it must be accomplished by shadow effects.

While examining the artwork, you must determine which features can be captured by embroidery and which ones cannot. It may be necessary to alter or enhance the artwork. This is especially true for smaller images, where some of the finer details are too small to capture with embroidery. Eyes are critical because they have so many details of their own. Too many times, what are supposed to be tiny white highlights end up looking like cataracts, because of an excessive number of stitches. If the eye is very small, leave out the highlights entirely. But if the eye is large enough lay the highlight down first, then digitize the pupil on top of it, leaving a tiny hole for the white to show through, which makes a neater looking eye. As well, make sure both eyes are looking in the same direction. It helps to look at your sample swatch in a mirror, which is an old artist's trick.

While the prominent details and features of the face are a challenge, they also are quite visible, thus they are achievable. But bringing skin colors and contours to life is a much more difficult task. The key is to use subtle shading to give the illusion of contour while using flat stitches. It takes very careful blending to get the true dimension and color required. It’s not uncommon to use five or six different shades of flesh tone thread carefully blended to achieve the proper look.

Proper blending is a critical factor. Many novice digitizers relate blending to sunsets that have bold color shifts from yellow to orange to red. The goal in blending for human anatomy is to make subtle transitions that are almost imperceptible to the human eye. You can create shadow, which gives the illusion of depth, by adding in light grays. But you don’t simply add a layer of gray over a layer of flesh tone. You must carefully blend it in, by making gradual changes in color from the original flesh tone to the gray, such that the shift is barely noticeable. In addition, the colors should not be layered, but carefully meshed together. Colors must feather out well. You need tone on tone feathering with a gradual shift in color to get the true dimension that you are seeking. In fact, the selection of thread colors can be more important than the actual blending technique.

Bottom line, shading is a very important part of face digitizing. A face is generally one basic color accented by many variations of shadows and subtle shading. Try to achieve as much shading as possible through the use of texture and stitch variation, rather than thread colors. This is achieved by using a combination of different stitch densities, directions and lengths.

This is the reality of faces. The process is slow, labor intensive and time consuming. It is not a task for a novice digitizer, yet it’s a great project to learn by. Every digitizer should attempt to digitize a face just for the educational value of the process. It may be something you work on in your spare time, over the course of several months. In fact, you may keep modifying it such that you never really finish the project, but the knowledge you will obtain is worth the effort you will expend.