How to Create Depth and Shading in Your Embroidery Piece

1. Intro : Hi, my name is Florence. I'm an embroidery artist from the Netherlands. I started with embroidery in 2016, and basically never stopped. I never went a week without embroidery. I discovered it on Instagram, and it looked very, very difficult. But the more I zoomed in and the more I looked at tutorials, which were very few. In 2016, I couldn't find any tutorials. A couple of them I found online and YouTube. Not as it is today with all of those online classes, online like this one. I started with basic shapes, but after a while, I saw people on Instagram making shadings and lines of clothing folds and hair and that kind of thing, and I really wanted to try it myself. At this point, I'm making embroidery pieces where you can see the hair and the shadings, and all these other things. In this class, I want to show you how to make that. I'm going to show you how you can turn a T-shirt and add depth and feel to it with different kind of thread colors. It's basically going to be a white T-shirt, but we're going to make it with folds so it has more shading to it. 2. Tracing: We're going to start with tracing our image. I have the image on my computer. What I use is tracing paper. It's this. It's very easy to use, and you can buy it anywhere. It's not really expensive, but I use it all the time for my projects. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put this on my computer to trace the image. If you're not comfortable, that I can imagine. You're like, "I don't want to put my tracing paper on my computer and trace it because I'm scared that I'm going to ruin my computer," which you are not going to do. But if you think you are going to do that, then print out the image, and trace it over like that. But I'm going to trace it over my computer, I'm going to brighten this very high so I can trace it over. This is the image we're going to work with. We're not going to use the whole image, we're just going to use the shirt. I scale the image, and now, I'm going to use my tracing paper. For the beginning of the tracing, you're going to use a normal pencil. I'm now going to line out all the folds. We're just going to make a rough sketch of the lines. Later on, we're going to enhance it with a fine liner. You see the end result, we're now going to take a fine liner, and enhance the lines, with the image next to us. I place the tracing paper on a white paper so you can see it better, and for me to have an underground. Now, we're going to put a bit more detail in with the pencil. I will put the image next to the video so you can see how I make the shading a bit more detailed. The next step is to use a fine liner. This can be any basic fine liner you want. You just go over the lines you created with your pencil. Now, we are done recreating our image, and we can now put the image on our fabric. You will need an embroidery hoop. This one I have is 6.50 centimeter, but our image is small, so you can also use a smaller one. This one I just had laying around, and it was the first one I saw. For the fabric, I use muslin cotton. In my class description, you can find a link for some really pretty cotton from Trish Bair's website. It is a cotton that I highly recommend. Make sure you cut off all the excess fabric so it doesn't get in the way while you are doing embroidery. I'm going to repeat the process we did before. I'm going to put the tracing paper on my laptop, and trace over it with my pen. I can understand that you don't feel comfortable using a fine liner like me. In that case, I have links to friction pens in my class description. You can use a blow dryer after you're done with your embroidery, and the panel disappear from the heat. The next step is going to be the stitching. 3. Embroidering: Starting with the darkest color at the beginning of the lines that I created. From now on, I will speed up the time with every color I use. You can still see the process, and if you want to see it's slower, then simply just adjust the speed of the video. Now, we are starting with the lighter gray color. We're just going to finish the lines completely with the gray. Now, we're going to use all the white for filling in all the other parts and you will see the contrast and how to create folds and depth in your work. Thank you so much for watching my class. I hope you got some helpful tips on how to create depth and folds in your embroidery pieces.