Type: Photo embroidery
Technique: Ercigoj stitch
Year: 2012
Edition: Limited
Size: Medium
Dimension: 115 x 40 cm | 45.3 x 15.7 in
Number of stitches: over 800,000
Thread length: over 10 km | over 6.2 mi
Thread colours: 20
Development: over 300 person hours
Price: not for sale
About the artwork
Frozen Krka River painting that has served as an original for this beautiful embroidery depicts the castle of Otočec standing on an island in the middle of the Krka river, during an especially cold and snowy winter. Snow and frozen water create a stark contrast with trees and the bridge. The scene is bathing in a dramatic mixture of natural and artificial light. The original motif by Borut Peterlin was transcribed in an exquisitely delicate play of threads, to create this remarkable embroidery.
About the artist
Borut Peterlin loves the term Antiquarian Avant-Garde art movement. He is famous for his outstanding and varied reportage and art photo series. For many years, he has been dedicated his time to 19th century photography and photo development techniques, such as collodion wet plate process. A graduate of Prague’s FAMU Academy and postgraduate at The London College of Printing.
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.