Using Photographs to Design for Tapestry - part 2
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about working from photographs for tapestry design. In the course of the post, I mentioned Photoshop and one of the ways I use it when designing tapestries. In short, I scale the smaller drawing to print out sections of a grid proportionately larger.
I also mentioned tracing with a light table being an option. It’s another common practice to enlarge images. In this case, I would need to eyeball each part of the grid and enlarge each section manually. It does allow for more intimacy with the image, but may not be as accurate as the original sketch or photo, so I usually opt for the Photoshop method.
In the comments after that post, I Iearned from a reader of an alternate method of tracing and enlarging images with an app called Camera Lucida. Thank you, Steve! Of course, I looked it up right away. I’m sharing that with you here because- well, I think it’s pretty cool.
Apps are rarely intuitive for me, so I went straight to the help section, which has both a manual (yes! A real manual) and excellent YouTube tutorials.
So I watched a few videos. Then went back and downloaded the manual, which I’m thrilled to say was basically a transcript of an intro tutorial; something else I greatly appreciate.
And then I tried it out.
I picked a photo for starters, the one at the beginning of this post.
Played around with the transparency.
Projected image onto paper with pencil
Did a little tracing… it takes practice and that’s mentioned in the tutorial. The hand and the mind synch. You can see that in my image below with the greyscale view. Going slower did eventually help.
But once I get the hang of it, I can see where it will have a lot of potential.
Another great feature with this app is that once the photo is locked in place to draw from, you can zoom in easily to any part of the image and it stays in synch!
View showing 3 shades of gray- and how off-synch my tracing was in the beginning!
And a really cool thing is that you can change the view to show a number of possibilities. The ones that are of most interest to us tapestry weavers are Grayscale and Posterize. If you click on Posterize, you can even choose how many shades you want to show. The entire image can be displayed - OR just one of the shades to trace individually.
Wild.
Remember the Value of Value in Tapestry?
So that was all well and good, a great learning experience, but what I still need is to make a larger drawing.
Bundle Flower: first cartoon- needs enlarging to fit warp
The piece that I mentioned in that post two weeks ago needs to be enlarged. I blew it up thinking I would be weaving it bottom up- before I’d thought it through.
Ever do that?
When I realized I needed the drawing turned on its side (so that I could do the color blending in the background as planned) that meant I needed to enlarge it.
My problem was if I got the photo projected onto the drawing pad large enough, my arms weren’t long enough to reach the paper to draw. Maybe if I were better at drawing with a long stick…
Back to YouTube. I found another video showing how to mirror the camera from the iPad or iPhone onto a monitor to work on a larger piece.
Cool.
So turns out this does work for larger pieces, but requires synching the iPhone or iPad to another monitor like my MacBook pro. I could then position the laptop to where I could both draw and see what I was drawing. Now how cool is that?
You do need a couple more things to do that. One being the extra monitor, and two a screen mirroring app. The one mentioned in the tutorial is called Reflector 3. It is priced at $17.99, but has a 7 day free trial which is nice to run some tests and see if it will work for you.
Pretty slick.
I’m looking forward to trying this out further. At this point, I only did a few little tests to demonstrate here and become more familiar with it.
Have you used this app or something similar?
Please share it in the comments!