Jamie Hood of David Sharp shares his top tips for digitising embroidery portraits
Making an arrangement of stitches look like a real person’s likeness is not easy, but if you keep it simple and try not to add too much detail, it’s more than achievable. The key when digitising embroidery portraits is to tackle each key facial ‘feature’ one at a time and remember, as with most embroidery digitising, less can be more.
The first step is to identify what order to digitise in and build up a face design. Making a start can be daunting, but building up in these simple layers makes it easier. The following steps will suit the majority of times you are digitising embroidery portraits.
Step 1: hair base layer
Step2: skin details
• Step 1 If it’s a person with long hair, you will need to design the main bulk of the hair first, leaving the fine strand details until last. This hair ‘background’ stitches first to give the illusion it sits at the back of the head and flows down the neck behind the head and shoulders.
If the person has short hair you can start with the skin first and do the hair later on top.
• Step 2 Use the solid and flat ‘tatami’ stitch for the skin. Do the neck first, then the face afterwards, so the neck looks set back from the face.
• Step 3 Next, focus on the details like the clothing and facial features, plus any skin highlights and shading tones that you want to add.
• Step 4 The strands of hair and hair details that fall on top of the face can be done as the last step.
Step 3: facial details – eyes, mouth, cheeks…
Step 4: hair details
Digitising embroidery portrait details
The following tips will help you to digitise the individual elements:
• Hair This needs to be made from more than one colour in order to give it depth and mimic light reflections; this design has four colours in the hair.
The base stitch, a solid tatami stitch background, will do the majority of the work here. This can be one-colour solid object, or three or four objects if you want to use different stitch directions to show hair flow. It doesn’t need to be heavy in stitches – a stitch spacing of 0.50mm works well for the hair ‘background’.
The hair ‘strands’ that run over the top are best made from running stitch, lines of running stitches that flow from the crown of the head and back again. The running stitch strands here are set to 3mm stitch length. The hair strands do not need to cover the whole head, you want the background base colour of the hair to show through.
• Skin A solid tatami fill stitch works here, with 0.40mm stitch spacing. In this example, as it’s a larger design, we have cut out holes where the eyes and mouth will go – this is to prevent a heavy and bulky build up of layers of stitching. If the design is a smaller chest size, for example, you may not need to do this.
In this example, the ‘dimples’ and nose shape details have been created using the ‘User defined split’ tool in Wilcom. This manipulates the tatami fill stitch to create line patterns in the stitching – great for subtle face detail without the need to stitch on other colours.
• Eyes The temptation is to put lots of colours and stitch detail into the eyes, but simple is best for eye embroidery. Do the background of the eye, ie the white area, first as a tatami fill stitch. Then do the iris next, also as a solid tatami fill stitch.
Then move onto the black details: outline the eye and the iris in running stitch, and incorporate some eyelashes in running stitches too. Don’t be tempted to add a lot of eyelashes though as you want to see some space between them when stitching and they will stitch heavier than how it appears on screen. This design has around 1.5mm between each lash.
Finish with satin stitch for the top part of the eye and the pupil, linked to the black outline of the eye to prevent trims.
Bringing it all together – the finished digitised design
Simplify the details when digitising a smaller portrait
Final details
• Mouth Start with the inside of the mouth first – the background under the teeth – using a tatami fill stitch that is light in stitches (0.6mm stitch spacing). Then do the teeth next, with each tooth made from a satin stitch object. Overlap the teeth slightly as they will pull in naturally when stitched (ie the teeth will be narrower when stitched out than they are when digitised) and you do not want big gaps between the teeth.
Do the lips last. If the design is large, use tatami fill stitch; if it’s a smaller design, use a satin stitch (satin stitches have a natural shine when stitched).
• Nose When it comes to digitising a human nose it’s more about what you leave out. Digitise as little as possible. Use thin lines of run stitches to highlight the bulbus bottom part of the nose, and then a run stitch line down one side of the nose only – not both sides. Or, as in this case, don’t add a line down the side of the nose at all, just add a light area of shading down the left side to give a suggestion of nose shape. The nose needs to be as subtle as possible and stitched in a tone a shade or two darker than the skin on the rest of the face.
• Skin tone details and shading To lift the skin and show highlighted areas, such as the cheeks or the shadows under the chin, use light areas of tatami fill stitch on top of the skin. Stitch these areas in a colour a few shades darker than the chosen skin colour (don’t go too much darker) using a tatami fill stitch with no underlay stitches. Use wide stitch spacing – the cheekbone highlights here have a 1.7mm space between each row of stitching.
Good luck with digitising embroidery portraits!
