How To Embroider on a Photo

So today I'm going to show you the tricks of the trade on how to embroider on a photograph. Whether that photo is on canvas or on paper, I'm going to show you how to embroider on a photo. So with my friend Walker, that's him, we're going to show you how to embroider on a photo today. Hi Walker. So we did this one a couple of days ago and I'll show you how or what we did to do this at the end of the video. I actually learned a bunch of things, the new things I'm actually now going to incorporate with my embroidery. And Walker's been embroidering on canvas on photos for like five years now. So he knows all the secrets and the trades of the trade. What's that word? All the secrets and the tricks of the trade. He's going to show us how to embroider on a photo. So you pick a photo that you want to embroider on. I have a printer in house. How rude of my phone. But you can send it out to get printed on canvas. Yeah, but because you do have a printer, you stretch your own canvas. How do you do that? Usually go and buy the canvas and I take off the canvas that they have on because it's not the canvas that I prefer to embroider on. Oh, so like you've ripped off the canvas. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. You could do that or you can buy. Just the wooden stretcher bars. Yeah. Cool. And then you lay it flat, you stretch out the canvas. So I had a piece of cloth laid down because I didn't want the staple gun to put any pressure on the photograph that would damage the photograph on the bare table. But again, you wouldn't have to worry about that if you bought it out of house. Once you get your canvas, what's the next step? I use either a white gel pen type marker or a Sharpie and I draw out my design. I tend to use references because I like it to look as accurate as possible. But you can freehand if you're good at it. Which you killed it. A lot of people ask me how I stabilize it and the way you stabilize it is way better. Yeah, I use a ruler that is longer than the dimensions of the canvas. I just bought metal clamps at Home Depot. And you clamp it onto the ruler. And you also, you have little pieces of cloth that go under the ruler to also protect the canvas I saw. So once you have it stabilized, you're ready to embroider. Yes, you're ready to get started. The first thing I noticed when we were doing our piece was that you split your thread every single time. What tricks do you have for splitting thread? You have to make sure that the loose end of the thread is hanging or it's going to get caught up and turn into a knot. It's going to be frustrating. I did that so many times. Or either tape it onto the table or use your mouth or teeth to hold the very end. And as you split it, it'll naturally ungrind. The reason I split my thread is to get more detail in and you're saving thread by not having to buy as much. Right. And that's one thing that I'm going to do from now on. I just would just thread the needle with all six strands. So when I was pulling it through the canvas, I was actually pulling 12 strands through the canvas, which made bigger holes. So now to save me, I'm actually just going to split it into three and do it how you do. So I'm only doing six strands at a time. Yeah. I also noticed when we were doing our piece, you taped up certain fingers. I pushed through with my ring finger on my right hand, which I keep on the bottom of the canvas. And so you tape up that little knuckle. So I tape up that knuckle so I'm not damaging my hand. Right. And then I use my middle finger to push through on the top. So by stabilizing the canvas, you free up both of your hands to be able to embroider, which essentially makes it twice as quick. Oh, and that's super apparent. And you'll all see he finished half the time on our little collab. Just so I'm pulling and pushing kind of with both hands. And it's effective and it's efficient. The other thing you do is to avoid making pinholes, like the little white dots, how you guide your underhand. Yeah. To make your first spot. So I lay the top of the needle on my index finger right next to the nail so I can guide with the tip of my finger underneath where I'm not looking. So I know exactly where I'm pushing the needle in. It just saves from leaving any unnecessary, like poke holes that you might have to fill in later. And I'm going to try to show you again at the end of the video, after I show how we did our collab, how to fix those little pinholes because I made a ton. Canvas is a tight enough woven fabric that I don't ever tie off my threads after I'm done with that certain color because the likelihood of it unstitching is very low. And with my designs, they're so large that the loose thread just gets caught up in all of the embroidery anyway. So it just kind of ties itself into the piece rather than me having to turn the piece over every time and tie off every single little piece. After you're done, completely finished with the piece, you can turn it over then and see like, oh, if there's any really long, loose thread. Right. Which there are some on that one. I know there's tons. They're all mine. You can then go and clean it up if you'd like. Nobody, unless they buy your piece is going to see the back. Speaking of buying a piece, these will be up on the site. I don't have the price for them yet. We'll figure that out. Probably around, I'm thinking like $12,000 to $2,000. So we'll have those up on the website. And then also some prints, a limited number of prints. Should I keep my stuff limited? I think that about covers it, how to embroider on a photo. You can do it on paper, but it'd be really hard because if you got your whole suit close together, you'd eventually tear. Maybe I'll show you guys that right now. So I found this photo at a thrift store. While I was there, I also found this record player, this book and this photo. I'm going to embroider on these as well. That's a future video. So I got a white pen to draw on it like Walker, but then decided I want to just freehand it. I also made a little stand. You don't need that. It's just so it holds still while I film. I got all the thread. First thing I did was split it. And I went up underneath it to start it. And it was kind of a thicker paper. So it was hard. So first thing I did was actually poke a hole from the top. And I liked that a lot because then I knew exactly where I was coming up. And maybe that'd be easier on a thinner photo. But for this one, every single time that I was going to do a thread from the bottom, I actually pre-poked a hole right here in the top. So I was worried that it wasn't going to work. Like if you got the holes too close together, it'd tear out. And I did get the holes pretty close together on this photo on the paper. But I was pleasantly surprised at how close I get the holes without it tearing. It happened a couple times. But for the most part, I just had to be like a little more conscious of where I was putting my thread. So like pre-determine what I was going to do. And by poking all the holes on top for my under thread helped with that a lot. Yeah, got this cute little striped face girl. So now you can run on a photograph that's on paper. So cool. Cool. I did ask people on the old Instagram if they have any questions for us. Do you want to go through those? Okay. Let's see. Barb's asked, what did you study in uni? I actually didn't go to university. Got inspired to embroider by Chanel. Releases these kind of similar videos of each of their lines every season. I wish I could show his boys and flowers in like complete, but they're like naked guys. So I'm a little hesitant to show on YouTube. Yeah, I was naked in my last video, whatever. But I'll show you like the details of it. They're absolutely stunning. If you just build a good foundation and you just start making art now, there isn't a whole lot that you can't find online. And the best way to learn is to just practice yourself and figure out what you're really good at and just go for it. I want to overlay a little gopher. What do you say that? Gopher. So SpaceFL asks, are there any projects you've done whose outcomes were not worth the effort? You can get caught up and if you don't sell it, you don't think it's worth the effort. But I have to constantly remind myself that I'm not making art for money. I'm making art for myself. So I try and do projects that I'm passionate about, not because I'm making money off of it. It's funny because the time that I didn't do something I was passionate about, it was something for like Halsey or like the music production studio and they paid me an exposure. Love it. Artist's favorite thing. I'll pay you an exposure. And it's so funny. Like what they did is they tagged Atchmood literally like this big on the screen. And so no one ever saw it, but it's fine. Was it worth the effort? No, but it's just me being salty too. I mean, and of course you have to do things to make money. Right. But don't lose that. Don't get lost in that idea because money's not gonna make you happy. That's the truth though. Unless you can buy pizza. Money does. Zellger Zart, it's hard to say. Zellger Zart asks, favorite dead artist you would love to collab? My favorite artist is Gustav Klimt. That's such a good answer. I can imagine like some of your embroidery like on his painting pieces. Like what's the one, the kiss? And then there's also the lady in gold or something. Am I right? The woman in gold. Woman in gold. Those two. Walker got some gold thread from DMC. You said you're gonna do a... Yeah, I'm gonna do a self-portrait. Yeah. And the thread is 24 karat gold. And DMC was the company that sent it to me. That's actually, that's the only thread I use. Yeah, it's the only thread that I really use because they have such a variety. You have to show it to me. I want to hold it in my hand and see how much it weighs. So your favorite dead artist would be Klimt to work with and that'd be cool. I think my favorite dead artist would be the one who did the Mona Lisa, Leonardo DiCaprio. But yeah. Also, this is Nate. Stop. He's gonna help edit videos from now on. So I hope he'll be able to put out more videos. Anyways, I'll put a link to socials to Walker. And the originals and some prints will be available on both our sites. So now I'm gonna show us making this one. But before I do that, future Brian has something to say. So super stoked that Skillshare is sponsoring this video. They're one of my favorite people to work with just because the whole group of them are also like creative types. And so they kind of get us. So for those who don't know, Skillshare is an online learning community. So it has a bunch of different classes for the creative and the curious people like us. One thing I learned from working with Walker is that even though I've been doing embroidery for so long, he had like certain insights and certain things that he was doing differently that brought like new ideas and new ways to better or further my learning, further my embroidery, which I thought was I was pretty good at embroidery. So I learned that if I came in with an open mind trying to learn something, it's gonna happen. So whether you're an expert, beginner, intermediate, whatever, they have classes for you. Just looking up real quick, a couple classes I think would be really cool. I found this one that's painting with thread, modern embroidery for beginners. And looking through really quick, it looks like she she looks like she uses colors in an unconventional way. So that'd be fun. Looking at like the breakdown, which I love. That's how they have it set out. Like number two is break the embroidery mold, which I'm sure is going to teach us a little bit about exactly that. Like not doing like not thinking embroidery in the traditional sense. Another one, funny enough, is embroidery on photographs with 10 simple stitches. And I'm really curious to know how they did it, if they did like how I do it. And like, although I've like shown you how to, I'm sure she's going to go through the things that I don't do. That's honestly going to make me a better embroiderer. So that's cool. So Skillshare is curated for like specifically for learning, meaning there's no ads. They're always launching those originals, those premium classes, and it's less than $10 a month with an annual subscription. So right now at a time when there's so many important conversations going on, I feel like your voice, your individual voice has more impact and power than any other time. And so why not make that a time to explore that, explore your creativity, to have a voice for good. First thousand people to use the link in the description below, we'll get a free trial for the Skillshare premium membership. So there's another tool that'll help you be a curious creator. I'm gonna show you that collaboration with Walker, right? So this looks like I'm upside down, but I'm actually not. I'm on that side of the table and Walker's on this side of the table. So we both just took turns drawing out what we thought would be nice. Then I added some, some cute little flowers wrapping around the fingers there. Flip it around, let him draw, and just did that back and forth. Originally, we were thinking that we would embroider like the flowers that we drew, but we actually ended up embroidering one side each. So I embroidered on the right side, he embroidered on the left. And so it was cool to see the different styles of embroidery and like our interpretations of each other's flowers. So once we got it all drawn out, Walker actually let me pick like the base colors here. And then he added some like low lights and highlights. And with that, we went off. So funny enough, we're, those are both the flowers that I drew that we're embroidering right now. Those red ones, mine on the left is on the right. And it's crazy to see how different they turned out. Also, his yellow flower that he's doing right now is going to be my purple flowers. Then his purple flowers are my yellow flowers. So it's crazy how like we interpreted it differently. Also, yeah, he's already done. So now I'm all left alone. I also was thinking that it'd be cool to do like a split my thread because I didn't split my thread at all on any of these, but I was going to split it and do a black outline. Then ended up liking like a thick gold outline on some of the things. And we're done. I got a Copic marker to fill in the little pinholes, but ended up just using it to add shadows. So making the flowers kind of look like they're popping out. Then to fill in the pinholes, I just used a mechanical pencil and kind of pushed them in a little bit. And it worked. It worked for the most part. I think the better thing could have been to paint it, but I was actually okay with how it turned out. So honestly, super in love with this piece and you're going to be a little jealous whoever gets it. So that's available. And then also some prints are available on mine and Walker's website. I was actually really pumped on how this all turned out. Love the format of working with other artists. And so this might be a continuous series where I find artists and kind of learn from them and then use it to make my own like tutorial videos slash kind of add my one, two cents. But yeah, cool.