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I wrote my own Tapestry Design computer program and started designing and stitching my own tapestries at the end of 2019, and into the early part of 2020. So far, I have completed thirty, and I usually have two or three new pieces ready to be started, with designs complete and wool ordered.

These galleries include all but a handful of those tapestries.They are laid out here in chronological order, and in groups based on the underlying themes. I’ve rewritten and modified the design program a number of times to keep up with new ideas as I work on them.

Beach huts

I had always been quite intrigued by the technique of pixellation - where the pixels of a photograph are simplified to larger blocks of average colours. I set out to write a design program to take a source photo (in these cases, of beach huts), pixellate it, and then to assign wool sample colours to make up the design. This meant drastic reductions in the number of colours. Many photos often have literally hundreds, if not thousands, of unique colours, and these had to be reduced to a sensible palette size - usually between forty and sixty distinct colours. The result is a huge simplification and abstraction of the original photo.

Squares

I decided pretty quickly that I didn’t want to continue with figurative work, however abstracted it was. Having always been interested - but talentless - in mathematics, I decided to explore designs bases on squares, set out in four rows of four, a total of sixteen, or four squared, and where sixteen four-sided shapes result in sixty four sides, or four cubed…

I spent some time with my sketch pad, and more time rewriting the program. I took out the pixellation emphasis, and included some basic drawing tools for sketching, lines, rectangles, polygons, etc.I set up better links between the tapestry, palette,
and the images of wool samples.

After doing a simple design based on complementary colours (Tapestry 6), I also began to experiment with raising the squares off the canvas by adding shadows behind them…

It became apparent very quickly that I needed more control over the design - particularly the elements that were indentical and that might need to be simply moved around, singly or en-bloc, rather than redrawn. I could also see the advantage of being able to quickly bring some parts in front of, or behind, others. At the same time, basic drawing and sketching was quicker and more intuitive. I wanted to be able to include both, and to be able to switch quickly between each mode. So, back to the computer to rewrite the whole program.

I began to introduce more shadows. Not behind anything, but cast onto the design by some object, unseen above the observer. These cast shadows could be from simple or complicated shapes, or even, in one case, yellow light being shone down. I also tried a kind of Fauvist introduction of random colour into the structural elements of three designs. I didn’t continue with this, but I did try a different kind of breakdown of law and order in a couple of later pieces.