Returning to its true form

My work and that of others in the Christchurch Creative Space was featured in an animated article by MsBehaviour of Mohawk Media.

There’s something that fascinates me about the finished product of craft/art not being the physical object itself, but the digital representations of the object.

People often ask me “what are you going to do with it when it’s finished” when they see me working on a piece of cross-stitch. My answer is almost always “take a photo of it and put it on the web, what else would I do with it?”. The actual finished physical pieces just sit in a folder in a cupboard, they’re not the point of the work, the point is to take things from the digital realm, reproduce them in a medium that takes a lot of effort and thought to give them a vibrancy and three dimensionality, then return them to whence they came.

I think partly this is because all of my career has been about publishing things digitally, but it also comes back to my training as an art historian. The Mona Lisa is not the small, somewhat unimpressive and grimy looking physical collection of dried paintstrokes in the Louvre in Paris, it is the picture of the painting in millions of books, and the memory of the image in the minds of millions of people.

I’m not sure if this thinking goes against the ‘take back control of the material production process’ ethic of the maker/crafter culture, or whether it runs alongside it in a complementary way, as the divide between the digital and physical worlds increasingly and inevitably blur.

1 Up

After taking years to finish the Street Fighter II piece, I decided that it’d be the start of a series, called ’1 Up’. A series of cross-stitch pieces based on the initial character selection screens on 1980s and early 90s arcade games.

I and my son and I had been playing a number of Mame games earlier this year, including Golden Axe. I choose a part of the character selection screen to do, and took out the background, replacing it with just one colour. Here’s the image.

Here are some progress shots.

Golden Axe progress 1

Golden Axe progress 2

Street Fighter II

Once I’d finished my ‘All your base are belong to us’ piece, I thought about what I’d do next. I’d been reliving my misspent youth by playing Mame games on the PC, including my all time favourite arcade game, Street Fighter II.

I decided to cross-stitch the character selection box from the original Street Fighter II. This had way more colours and more subtle gradations of colour than anything I’d done previously. Fortunately someone had mentioned to me that there was software available that could help turn images into cross-stitch patterns. I got a trial copy of PC Stitch and used it to make patterns of each of the individual characters in the character selection box. Here’s the original screenshot I used.

Here’s the finished piece:

Street Figher II

I went and bought the DMC threads to make Ryu (the top left character), and got started. I used 12pt Aida cloth, and three strands for each thread (DMC cotton comes with six strands per thread).

The software did a fairly good job of getting the DMC colours right, although often I had to use my own judgement. Sometimes this meant substituting one colour for another where there were only a few stitches in the new colour, and I already had a DMC thread that was near enough. This was fine for things like the eye colours, or the reds on Dhalsim, Ken, and E-Honda, that weren’t related to the colours adjacent to them.

Sometimes the software did really well on the fine gradations of skin colour, sometimes it got it really wrong. I had to unpick about 1/4 of Guile, go and buy three more smoothly graded thread colours, and redo the unpicked stitches to get the right result. It felt worth it though, I wanted Guile to be just right as he was the character I played most in the arcade game.

I’m still not quite happy with Dhalsim (the Indian fellow on the bottom right), as the mid tone shades are a bit green. I left him like that though as I was so keen to finish it. I started it in 2003, and only finished it this year (2009). It was so painstaking and fiddly, with so many colours that I often put it aside for a year or so, before picking it up again. The upside is that I now have about 100 colours in my thread collection.

Perhaps one day I’ll redo Dhalsim, or perhaps I’ll just leave him as is, a symbol of my perfectionist tendencies, and my (sometimes) ability to keep them at bay.

The photo above is a straight digital camera photo of the finished work. You’ll note I’ve used parts of it for the header of this blog, and used the magic of the GIMP to straighten out the parts where the tension has made the individual panels not quite square. Hopefully when I frame the piece, I’ll be able to achieve the same thing just by stretching the fabric a bit.

Some time soon I’ll list all the colours I used, and provide the patterns.

Searching for patterns

Once I’d done Manekineko I had a look at the local craft stores for new cross-stitch patterns. They were all dolphins jumping over rainbows, and teddy bears, and other patterns that people’s Grandmas might like. I didn’t like them. So I started thinking about what images had resonance for me, what represented things that had been part of my life so far.

All your base are belong to us - screenshot

Then it hit me. I had spent a lot of my leisure time from age 9 to 20 playing arcade games. Arcade games from that period (1979 – 1992) were perfect for cross-stitch patterns. They had a limited colour pallete, 256 for the newer games, and even less for the older ones. The images in the games had all been created as pixel art, rather than using 3D rendering engines.

I had also recently seen the ‘All your base are belong to us‘ flash animation on the web (this was about 2001), and like many people at the time I thought it was clever, and virally compelling.

All your base are belong to us

I decided therefore to cross-stitch Cats, the evil guy from Zero Wing, the arcade game that inspired the flash animation. I simply took a screen shot of the image of Cats, printed it out, then went to a craft store and choose the colours by eye. It went surprisingly well, although the contrast in some areas wasn’t ideal. I finished this some time in early 2003.

The original image of Cats (above) has big purple flowing robes but I didn’t want to spend the time stitching them. They would be beautiful but I didn’t have the patience at the time. If I was doing this one again, I would have done it on black Aida cloth, and maybe just done part of the cowl of his cape.

Somehow though, I quite like the disembodied, ‘bust’ like nature of this piece. It represents the removal (multiple times) of the image from its original context in the Japanese Zero Wing arcade game. That is, the game was ported by Sega Europe who poorly translated the language into English. It was then, years later, made into a flash animation remix that created a viral buzz on the web. I then took it, and painstakingly re-rendered part of it in an archaic, physical medium, normally associated with flowers, teddy bears and other innocuous imagery. Seen here it is so far removed from its inception, that Cats looks somehow more friendly, less evil, and lonely, or lost.

Disclaimer- although I’m now an IT consultant, my undergraduate degree is in Art History, so I may occasionally fall in to verbose, indulgent, grandiloquent and loquacious analyses of my cross-stitch. If I do, please forgive me.

My partner refers to this piece as a geek version of a ‘Home Sweet Home’ sampler that is common in old fashioned cross-stitch.

Manekineko

After finishing the Elizabethan Strawberry bookmark, I realised I really enjoyed doing cross-stitch. My partner knits at night while we watch TV, and I found cross-stitch similarly relaxing. It was a great way to unwind from a day working on information systems strategies, facilitating workshops, writing software procurement RFPs, getting people from different government agencies to share information and play nicely together, and all the other things I do in my professional career.

So, I went searching for patterns. I found one of Manekineko, the Japanese lucky cat you find on counters of Asian shops of all descriptions. Maneki literally means ‘beckoning’, and neko is cat in Japanese.

This was nice and easy to cross-stitch as it only had a few colours. It introduced me to the world of DMC threads and choosing colours. The gold thread was a little tricky to stitch as it’s metallic and doesn’t behave like normal thread.

Here’s the pattern I used. I don’t recall the exact DMC colours, but there are so few that as long as you get a white, black, grey, brown, red and gold you’ll get a similar looking final result.