"Kamala" 7755 beads. Framed in a hurry. There's brass framing for her. I'll cut it to length and re-frame her on the twentieth.
I’ve been asked how my abstract photo impressionist woven tapestries (h/t winifred3 ) come to be. It’s pretty straight forward. Find a picture, build an image, create an instruction set. Implement said instruction set.
In a very real sense I’m just printing a photograph on a phuqed up printer. It can’t get the colors right and the resolution sucks. I’m the printer, the ink is glass beads, and the paper, thread.
Not every picture can be rendered in one quarter of of a cga monitor’s screen and still be recognizable. Not that that’s necessarily a problem.
I look at a lot of pictures. Finding one that works is repetitiously redundant. Building the image is too.
I use photoshop to degrade the image in a variety of ways and format it into what the software I wrote demands.
The code shows me possible images, and saves them. I sort out what I like. A typical gradation and color set would create 21 trillion possible images. I could neither look at or even generate all of them. I can direct the search and do but even directed there are too many images to look through. If I don’t find anything to work with in the first few thousand images I begin anew. A different color set, a different gradation, a different picture. Any and all the above and I’m still not guaranteed to find something that works. I almost always patch together images from pieces of what my software generated. It can take a while and pieces don’t always patch. I work with a half dozen completely different pictures at any given time. It keeps me from getting too frustrated. I’ve ditched weeks of work only to come back later to the garbage I created and realize it was actually pretty good.
If you’re having troubling seeing her face tilt your head to the left or your monitor to the right
When this foray began over a decade ago it was pencil and paper, a spreed sheet, and photoshop. It took forever to convert a picture of me to just a few plastic beads by a few plastic beads to fit on the back of my work lanyard which was fading and still is. But it worked. Unwilling to do that again I started writing software. There was still pencil and paper and such but less so and the software evolved. Then I saw “the bug.” It wasn’t a death nail, there was a laborious work around so I put off fixing my then uncommented code until I couldn’t understand it. It’d been almost a year and I’d only done three weavings so I re-coded. It’s a different part of my brain that gets used writing software and art fell by the wayside. Six months on, the code was fixed. I’ve hacked into it and added comments a few times since then. There are more comments than code now. I’m running version 1.03. I have the executable. The source code? Yeah, well, it’s around. There are some features I’d like to add and a bug that’s actually turned into a feature that I’d like to make a choice so I should probably find the source. (Found it, broke it, fixed it, wary of doing more.)
I wove “Hillary” in the last year of the Obama presidency. After “he who shall not be named” started squatting in the White House I became dejected. I tried to keep making pretty weavings. No matter how many pictures I looked at nothing worked. I turned to images from the Holocaust.
Left and center from picture by Dorothea Lange. Right, Buchenwald camp liberation. All part of the ”survivor” series.
It seemed appropriate and it worked well. I’d get all the parameters right, right away. As his vile presents wore on I explored images from the Depression. A reflection of how I felt. After that a picture from America’s Jim Crow era, (my largest piece, 41625 beads) then the Vietnam war, famine in Africa, war in the middle East and then finally he was gone. Pretty was back in fashion.
“Sunflower” russia still hadn’t invaded Ukraine when this tapestry was done.
I burned out during the Biden administration. Recently I began weaving again, using an image I’d created a few years ago, “Einstein.”
“Einstein”
“Betty”
Since then I’ve created and woven two images of Kamala Harris. Neither of which I’m entirely pleased by but the second one has been well received. I also created and wove an image of my dog Betty. I just started weaving an image of my dog Coco. I made that image when I made the image of Einstein and they have some similarities. The complexity is significantly greater but they were made at the end of years of concentrated effort. After sitting on my ass for longer than I should have I’m back at the beginning. There’s less dithering, mostly large patches of solid color. My software doesn’t handle dithering well so a lot of that gets directed by hand. Changing a single pixel then standing back and judging the change is not uncommon. Even after it’s woven. I tore out four rows to change six beads for “Betty.” I’m still not happy with her left paw. But done is done. It’s framed and hung.
I’m once again moving toward the morose. The day after the election I started looking through pictures from Ukraine. Not there yet. 1940s, 50s gangland shootings. Not there yet either. Something pretty that’s gone I thought…. Marilyn Monroe...on the autopsy table.
“Marilyn” Some of what I pulled out of several thousand images made with an identical gradation.
A set of secondary selections. The one on the right contributed a good deal to the “final” image.
Part of the image creation process slowed down a whole bunch. The search is undirected here. Its cyclic nature is more evident. Yes, there are “mma,” “mmb,” “mmc,” “mmd,”… sequences. They don’t all go out to 5000. Each is a different color set or gradation.
My work space a week before that dark day.
Six weeks until I must abandon all hope, hence why I made “Betty” and am now weaving “Coco.”
“Coco” 8.5”x11” 10434 beads The instruction set was generated from this image and has already been changed.
Other pieces can be seen in my WAYWO about framing.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/8/25/2259409/-WAYWO-I-ve-Been-Framed
As soon as I climb out of this rut I’ll do a WAYWO on the details of weaving.
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