Pixel Shading – the Finish

Today we’re finishing up the pansies. The picture above is the piece as the top for a Framecraft cut crystal jar. Since the last post the two lightest colors of blue-violet have been stitched, the middle color of yellow has been filled in, and the leaves have been stitched.

In our previous lesson, I stitched the lightest shade of yellow on the left petal. The middle shade of yellow went into the open holes on the left and the outer holes on the right. While the difference between the two is slight, the stitches on the left are more uneven. It also is easier to miss stitches when you fill in this way.

To see how the two different stitch orders work on similar petals compare the left yellow petal with the middle blue-violet petal. The yellow petal stitched the middle shade last. The blue-violet petal was stitched from dark to light.

The leaves were also stitched in pixel shading. Here you can see one possible problem with this. The jump in value from the middle shade to the dark shade is large; as a result those stitches stick out. In any color family of threads the jumps from shade to shade will vary. The closer the values are to each pther, the more effective shading will be.

When you have small areas, pixel shading can be less effective because colors don’t have much space to mix.

Because the pansy threads are overdyed, the colors blend into each other; you can see this in the close-up picture above. But to get a feel of why pixel shading works and the end result from a viewing distance, here’s the same picture blurred;

Between the slight color changes of the had-dyed threads and te effects of pixel shading, the resut is a very realistic pansy.