Type: Photo embroidery
Technique: Ercigoj stitch
Year: 2012
Edition: Limited
Size: Medium
Dimension: 81 x 61 cm | 31.9 x 24 in
Number of stitches: over 900,000
Thread length: over 11 km | over 6.8 mi
Thread colours: 42
Development: over 400 person hours
Price: not for sale
About the artwork
Summer solstice has a special mythological meaning in Slovenia, especially in Dolenjska region. It is believed that everyone who goes to forest on the midsummer night and has a fern seed in their pocket is given magical powers of understanding animals. Borut Peterlin was searching for this magic deep in the forest, and it seems to have found it in a series of photographs full of surreal forests and vivid colours – an ideal motif for us to remake it as an embroidery, as embroiding is capable of the most vibrant colour transitions imaginable.
About the artist
Borut Peterlin loves the term Antiquarian Avant-Garde art movement. He is famous for his outstanding and varied reportage and art photo series. For many years, he has been dedicated his time to 19th century photography and photo development techniques, such as collodion wet plate process. A graduate of Prague’s FAMU Academy and postgraduate at The London College of Printing.
Features
Innovation of layering
We layer multiple colours of threads and so create rich embroidery and colour texture that is impossible to create with classic one-layer embroidery technique. By layering, we develop colour transitions and shadowing, by which we create multiple-colour surfaces, similar to pointillism painting.
Smooth transitions and shading
By intertwining threads of endless colours and creating colour transitions, we can shape soft shadows, make one surface transition into another and mix colours into an endless multitude of hues. This way, we can also recreate motives from photographs and sophisticated art paintings which wouldn’t be possible with classic embroidery technique, using vector surfaces.
Sophisticated colour calibration
Usually in embroidery, 10 or 20, maybe 30 colours of threads are used. We use around 1,000 colour hues and if a colour still doesn’t match the desired one, we create it by layering and colour transitions. We have digitally scanned colours of all threads by using a spectrograph, so we can colour match any colour from an original material or from CMYK, RGB or Pantone colour schemes.