Type: Photo embroidery
Technique: Ercigoj stitch
Year: 2013
Edition: Limited
Size: Medium
Dimension: 67 x 100 cm | 26.4 x 39.4 in
Number of stitches: over 2.1 mio
Thread length: over 25 km | over 15.5 mi
Thread colours: 34
Development: over 500 person hours
Price: not for sale
About the artwork
We’ve monumentalised the Playboy Playmate Kyra Milan (Miss March 2010) in a way neither she or the photographer ever thought possible. Within the confines of limited number of thread colours available in the grey spectrum, the embroidery has managed to capture both the subtlety and incredible details of the original photograph.
About the artist
Jarmo Pohjaniemi comes from Finland, and is a photographer for the American edition of Playboy magazine. He is well known for his fashion photography work for the largest world brands, and also for his work in video production. He is one of the founders of international Shoot the Centerfold workshops.
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.