At this point in my design process, things look pretty chaotic. But, actually I made quite a bit of progress… even if it doesn’t look like I got a lot of designing accomplished. One of the main issues I dealt with was: How dark should it be behind the colonnade? Well it turns out that my first choices were too dark: In this image, the space behind the man remains too dark. The spaces to the left are closer to the colors I think I need.
I know it’s hard to see *that* much of a difference… I pretty much just dropped the darkest shades of gray. I can easily imagine things will change in these areas quite a bit… they seem very flat and boring to me at present. We’ll see.
Here’s the color palette I’m using: Sorry, the colors are really not true in this shot. What looks like oranges are really gold-ish browns, and you really can’t see the antique purples much at all.
Normally I don’t label everything, but this time I’ve found it useful to group colors by value (darks to lights) and all of the color/blends within those values. Originally, I was going to make the colonnade masonry shades of gray, until I remembered that the colors of the stonework in the walled city scene are shades of gray, brown, gold and of course, antique violet. For the sake of design color uniformity, I switched to these colors:
…which I haven’t begun to add to the design yet, but will soon. First, I’ll design as much of the greenery as I can, because I’ll just wind up deleting a lot of the masonry hidden by the green stuff. Speaking of greenery, I choose colors for such areas like this:
I choose a “base” color family. In this case, the 524, 523, 522, 3363, 3362 DMC sequence I tend to use a lot. Then I pick a “brighter” series: the previous sequence blended in this case with the a yellow green sequence of colors. I’ll use these colors where the sun is hitting the foliage and I’ll probably only use the lightest shades of this color group. Then for the “shady” areas of the foliage, the original colors blended with blue greens for areas in shadow should work well.
Someone asked how I go about working the over-one into the chart. I don’t design over-one in the same chart as over-two. But I do use a simple method of keeping track where the edges of the over-two stitching end, and the over-one edges begin:
Since I have designed the over-one figures in another file, when I copy and paste the backstitch lines, I also reduce them by 50% so everything is proportional (Remember I use a CAD program, so it makes this kind of thing very easy.) I choose a fixed point in the main design…something I won’t be changing: in this case, the column because it’s between the figures. When I have the figures positioned where I want them, I create a new layer and I draw squares which are the equivalent of the space a full cross stitch done over-two will take up on the chart, beginning at the edge of the column. (For clarity, I made them red.) When I’m designing, I fill in around the figures using these blocks as a guide. The rest of the “over-two edges” layer can be copied and pasted into the over-one designing file (and scaled up 200%) which will tell me where those over-one “fill in” stitches will need to be placed around the figures. This layer is usually invisible when I don’t need it because I find too many lines distracting. Which is also why I have the designing grid lines “grayed out” instead of black.
Hmmm. I guess it’s a little more complicated sounding than it is. Sorry about that.
I’m to the point where I’m soon going to need to start stitching to see how close I am with color choices… probably after designing the rest of the foliage and the far left column. I nearly always have to make color adjustments as I stitch, so don’t be surprised if things change drastically with the next post!
Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!
Then into the main file in the proper location:
Viola! The symbols are translated. Next, I print out this area… which I’m sure you’ve noticed is really pretty small compared to the rest of the cloister scene space. Sigh. I feel like I’ve been working on it forever! But that’s the way my process goes: I struggle and work to get colors just right… but when I do, things generally move along much more quickly after that.
