ImagesMagUK_June_2021

Shape shifters Erich Campbell outlines how to create embroidery objects in the first of his two-part series that delves into the art of digitising W hen using digitising programs, new digitisers can find themselves faced with contradictory suggestions and multiple tools to achieve the same shape. Digitising falls between fully automatic solutions and methodically plotting out each stitch manually. It uses a combination of manual drawing, vector manipulation and semi-automated stitch settings, allowing users to arrive at a solution that allows machines to be used efficiently while creating an aesthetically pleasing embroidery. To help you understand the options available to you, in this issue I’ll examine the common methods of creating embroidery objects from source art. Then, next month, I’ll discuss the tools used to draw, allowing you to more fully understand what it means to digitise. Import vs redraw In my early career, all digitising included ‘tracing’ over a raster image. Although this was easier than punching each stitch on massive magnetic tablets, which was the previous method used, we still had to draw every area to be filled with stitches over pixelated art with aliased edges, guessing at its intended extent. Vector was still a preferred source as we could scale up to create cleaner rasters for tracing and, when vector import became available, import it directly as a scalable art layer over which to work. As customers ever- increasingly provided vector art and decorators often produced even cleaner vectors for other processes, digitisers Credit: All images are courtesy of the author ! " # $ % & % # ! " $ & % & $ Despite looking incredibly similar, these three pieces were drawn with very different methods in digitising software. The left piece was drawn with a pen-tool similar to that in a vector package, but it was done with a split in the bowl of the ‘P’ to create a column of turning satin stitches instead of a unidirectional filled area. The middle set used a column entry tool that alternates points from side to side, and the right-hand pieces were made with a uniformly wide, stroke-like tool, set to the same finished width as the other elements The top example of this satin stitch ‘L’ shows you the vector-like elements you’d see in a digitised element with the stitch preview turned off. The green diamond is an entry point, where the stitching starts, the red ‘plus’ is an exit point, where the stitching finishes, the nodes are self explanatory, and the lines that cross the shape show the angle or inclination of the satin stitches at that point in the digitised shape. Below that, you see the very different way you enter points to arrive at this shape Pen Pen Column Uniform Column Uniform www.images-magazine.com JUNE 2021 images 65 KB TIPS & TECHNIQUES