Design Idea: Shading Study

While I was working my Bound Crosses and shading them, I thought that it might be interesting to do a full piece focusing on shading. The effect of shading by varying strand color is fascinating, and quite effective. My idea involves using very few stitch types, but instead focusing on color variation.

The top would be black all the way across the top, with columns going down that gradate in color to white. The arrangement across the canvas would be ROY G BIV, with a grey gradation bracketing it on either side. The trickiness would be in shading between the color families. For instance, the Red -> Orange border. I think you could do complicated shading like this, even with 4 strands, by slowly substituting the new color family into the strands of the previous. With 4 strands, you don't have much to work with, but if you pay attention to the directional flows (up, down, left, right) you could choose adequate combinations. The effect would be a very large gradual blend in any direction.

The result, of course, would be tiny stitch areas for each color combination. The design would have to accommodate all those switchovers by:

• Choosing stitches with adequate backing to bury both ends of the thread
• Have enough stitches to deal with the burial of threads, and prevent insanity. Can you imagine rethreading the needle for one or two stitches over and over? That would be bad.
  

Currently I am thinking that the stitches need to vary between the columns and the cross-column blendings -- a relatively flat stitch versus a "textured" or fat stitch. For example, Cashmere or Mosaic versus Bound Cross.

This weekend I will probably try some tri-color and quad-color shading as described above on my sampler, basically extending my current Bound Cross area. I'll also try Bound Cross with Mosaic or Cashmere to see how they look in relation to each other.

While looking around the web at shading information in needlepoint, I encountered Sphere on a Table, a shading study done by a beginning needlepointer using only black and white thread. His accompanying information says it took a very long time to finish and has numerous beginner's mistakes, but wow, what a labor. That takes nerves of steel.