Okay, this is going to turn out EXACTLY as cool as I'd hoped. There isn't much there yet, unless you're getting intimately familiar with the details of the shading the way I am, but you can definitely see the outline of Starscream's face :p Spoiler
You know, I should have just waited a day and then I would have had a much better picture to post :p Spoiler And I just realized, depending on how you count Whirl (where I remade the same pattern and stitched it twice), either Whirl or Starscream is my first duplicate character that I've worked with. WAIT, I tell a lie. First duplicate was Whirl or Megatron, because I did that megarod picture for larry. Fine, first duplicate I'm keeping for myself is Whirl or Starscream, and I think that’s just perfect. I need.... a Prowl. To round out the full set of my wonderful disaster boys. But Prowl seems to be lingering in the hands of artists with heavy linework, which is no good. I cannnn work on that Humorous herzspalter panel pattern, but that's an excel creation, and it's not the same kind of mind-melting+soothing as these gorgeous extravaganza patterns. I should comb through fayren's archives to see if she has any quality Prowl or Cyclonus art to work with, and then I can wrestle with the ethical question of whether as a professional transformers artist, I need to ask before I use (probably yes), and the silly question of whether to buy a place in her heart by offering her a stupidly expensive cross-stitch present (spock no)
I always forget to post things somewhere. But it's really funny with this red cloth, even though things aren't nearly all shaded in, so much of what's missing is reds that the fabric helps smudge the visual gaps. His right eye is still mostly empty, but it doesn't scan that way, and I don't think I've had a project with this effect before But a LOT of the Starscream surface area has been finished, and since some of his colors trailed over to the far right, I've got the positioning locked in to really start Windblade. She has some GORGEOUS blues in her part of the pattern, and after finishing a fic for these two, I'm extra stoked to see this finished :DDDDD Spoiler
I'm done with the stress of the silly out-of-state, high-stress interview (which went well) and I apparently decided to unwind with a solid eleven hours of cross-stitch. I woke up this morning, lazed a bit, picked up prescriptions, went to the gym, ate pizza, and took a nap...... Then eleven solid hours of embroidery, punctuated only by bathroom breaks and beverage acquisition. I watched two entire let's plays of ddlc, one right after the other, and could have kept going if not for the gnawing guilt over how bad I'm already going to screw up my sleep schedule :V Spoiler: large
The best part is that I only surrendered and started doing the paler outlines tonight XD I'd been holding out because ??????? (how do i make any of my decisions, seriously), but I gave in and started doing the light stuff so I could shade in Windblade's face. But god, I am ADORING this fabric!!!!! The low-contrast stitching is a pain but sooooooo rewarding, and even the lowest contrast colors are still much easier to pick out than they are when I'm working with black fabric. (i say this, having a next project picked out that is EXTRA large, on black fabric, with a significant portion of the image being night sky :VVVVV)
HOLY WOW that red one is incredible! It's so dynamic! I just started doing cross stitch a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't even know stuff like that was possible.
Ahh, thank you! I have to give a LOT of credit to the original art, I just happened to stick the image through pic2pat and just happened to have red fabric on hand. But this is new territory for me and I'm so stoked for how it's turning out :D
Today, I indulged myself and finally broke into the blues :DDDDDDDDD Spoiler: prr prr PRRRRR prrr prrrrrrrr
This is spoilers enough that I'm not going to post it to tumblr, but I have to get my instant gratification jollies somewhere :D I still need to work out the background pattern, but in terms of image, all the shading is done in the bottom left quarter, and the other quadrants are all close. Spoiler
there she is my pretty lady. my girl. my beautiful daughter who i love Spoiler aka I have three quarters of the canvas fully shaded, starscream will probably be done tomorrow, and then all that's left is finding a good white-on-white motif to use for the background and filling that nonsense in. I am going to be able to get this done in time to be framed, even if it means I don't get to show off the wip at the con I was going to bring it to.
:3c Spoiler: the tumblr post is scheduled for this evening, but I am a sucker for instant gratification Red fabric is the best and I love it. Starscream and Windblade are the best and I love them. The white background was boring, but I bought this set of LOTR borders on Etsy (which is great, they're lovely and the artist included explanations of their inspiration for all the borders). I brought it to the framers an hour ago, the guy I've been working with for years was there, he'll have it done before I move, and he knows that when I say bold, I mean BOLD, so the dominant mat for this is going to be this gorrrrrrgeous red velvet. I'm so tired, but so pleased.
This morning, I emerged from my closed area dungeon to take the cross-stitch off to the framers, then lingered in the cafeteria just long enough to queue up a tumblr post and sign my new lease, which are of course two tasks of equally high priority. I want to post now, but I want it to go up at a high-traffic time, and it's not like I'm near my phone to see tumblr responses until I leave work anyways. But!! I'm so excited!! I've been working with this guy who does the framing for over two years on more than a dozen projects, and he knows that I'm easy to please and not picky, but also that I like INTENSE. This is going to have a red mat, a gold internal frame thing, a red velvet mat, and then a swoopy wood frame that has red showing through the dark stain at the edges. That's a bad description, but I already have this frame on another project and I love it. And the frames for my grad school diplomas use the velvet mats in I think.... grey, dark blue, and maroon? And I love love LOVE them. The guy said that he'd worried that the mats might be strong enough they stole attention from the picture, but nope, your eyes still go right to their faces. So I'm glad my best children get a super lovely, flashy framing job. It's what they deserve. It's an expensive framing job, but I paid with a credit card, so that's fine because it's only pretend money (i kid, i save money by doing nothing exciting and sitting on my couch with my face buried in embroidery, and that's how i justify the frames). I have such a hard time picking favorites, and like, Getaway is amazing, plus the Starscream project is really cool, and even if I could have done Megatron larger he still has a fantastic palette.... But colors, composition, subjects, everything, this is a project that I REALLY adore.
Oh, duh, if I post something in here, that is much easier to find than letting it be slowly buried on my blog. This is a very good candidate for either my first or second attempt at traditional embroidery (depending on whether I decide to be sensible or overambitious). I have the one blogger I follow who has done tutorials specifically for embroidering comic art, the picture has strong lines and strong areas of black, I like the sentiment a LOT, and the edges of the fur just NEED to be embroidered.
Spoiler: black panther Eyyyy, black panther! I started the pattern two and a half days ago, when I knew there was a big storm coming, and then my entire hotel lost power for a day! So I actually finished the silly thing, when I was not at all planning for that to happen this quickly. I'm simultaneously glad I was able to do this before work started, but oh my god this is too much free time I am ready for work to start please. The piece is super wide (14'', which means the borders of my canvas are barely out of the shot), and it comes to ~5000 total stitches, and most of that is BORDER. But the border's adapted from that set of etsy lotr border patterns I bought, and I knew it was going to be painful, and I did it anyways and got committed before critical thinking could catch up with me. No ragrets :P
AHAHAHA, my little brother just asked if he could have this!! By which I mean, he liked the picture I put on facebook and sent me a text message saying 'hey, that cross-stitch project is really cool' and I was like *squints* and replied that making these is a lot of fun, and if I ever finish a word-based cross-stitch you want, it's probably yours for the taking, and YEP, NAILED IT. This is so funny to me. All of the kids inherited the thing from our dad/his dad where we'll get a weird interest about whatever, and wander quietly but determinedly after it off into the distance, but this brother always surprises me the most. This is cracking me up, he's more... call it habitually unimpressed? than the others, and now I'm like HA. YOU DO THINK I'M COOL. HAAAAAAA. Also, this will be the third large wall-hanging art Thing he's asked me to get him as a present, and you're still living in a dorm room, son, wat r u doing.
