Shadow Dragon embroidery detail

Here is a close look at the embroidery on our Shadow Dragon.

This is 23 thousand stitches. Actual size is 318mm across the wings, although the fabric got folded in slightly across the outer edge of the left wing while we were photographing it.

It actually started out as a development from an earlier horse design, depicting the Celtic goddess Danu as a horse . . . I guess it evolved a lot. One day we may post the original Danu Horse on DA but at the moment it's not a design that we're running on shirts so we don't have any photos. Anyway, it evolved from trying to portray the horsey goddess using rim lighting in stitches, into rim lighting of a dragon lurking in the shadows. These things happen.

It was all drawn out on the PC as stitch segments vector elements in the embroidery design software and considering how the stitches could be used to show the light playing along the edge of the dragon. Stitches have a lot of life in them, they catch the light themselves and change appearance depending on your position and the lighting position relative to the embroidery. So this embroidery came about through thinking about how stitches could represent light, and their interraction with their illumination, rather than the traditional concept of converting a 'flat' drawing into stitches.

The wings are built up as low density green, then low density turquoise, so the 2 colours mingle and create an iridescent effect.

The tail, legs and head use multiple layers of random length satin stitches to create the feathered edge of the edge lit area. Satin stitches are overlayed with stock fill patterns to create the scale effects. The turning effect on the tail uses the reflective characteristics of the thread directions to inject extra shading, here the main light source was high and slightly right, giving a darker area in the bottom left of the blue loop of the tail, which varies as the wearer moves creating quite a dynamic 3d effect. Similarly the left and right sides of the head use different stitch directions to create shading effects, with the left side of the face brighter using its horizontal stitches to represent the dragon's light source to the rear left of the image. The right side of the face uses predominantly vertical stitches to darken it.

Feel free to download the image for personal use (eg desktop, screensaver, pinterest, facebook, tumblr, etc) as is, but no derivative works or commercial use please.

The full shirt image is here:

The shirt is available from our Etsy shop: fancytogs.etsy.com