Chinese Suzhou embroidery is a traditional art which has a high requirement on hand skills. A piece of good Suzhou embroidery is a perfect combination of techniques and art, the quality of effect in the artwork becomes a criteria in judging Suzhou Embroidery. Normally we can tell from the following criteria.
1. To judge the concept of the whole picture, in present market, most of the concepts of pictures are similar, so we can tell creative embroidery form ordinary ones.
2. The fineness of the needlework: it plays the most important role in a picture. It should be very clear where the thread should be thick and where it should be thin, and they should hide the thread head and knot as well.
In order to make very fine embroidery, the thread must be divided into thinner ones. Splitting the silk thread is one of the traditional techniques of Chinese Suzhou embroidery, that means to divide the thread into several strands. Like half or a quarter of the original thickness, or even thinner. If you want to embroider the tail of golden fish, you should use very thin silk strands to express a sense of lightness and transparency. The silk strand used for the body of a fish should be thicker, giving people a sense of weight. If you want to embroider a stone, or a tree trunk, you must use thick thread, and a more random pattern. And for the stitching of a cat, a color change must be used for its fur, then the finished fur of the cat will be as vivid as real cat fur.
The last key point is that the needlework should be dense. The low quality embroidery is just printing the base picture, then matching it with several threads with similar color, and it will give people the impression of embroidery if you stand far away from the picture. But if you look at it carefully, you will find the pattern in the back.( Since the picture is printed, and after a period of time, the color of the ink will fade, it doesn't last long.) This kind of embroidery is fake.
An embroidery with high art value also has the base picture, but no matter how you check the picture, you will never find it on the base. The base picture has been covered by silk thread.( Good embroidery is usually made by hand. The procedure of Mechanical Graphing and manual graphing is different . Mechanical Graphing Computer jets the picture, then fixes it in the supporting frame. And because silk is quite flexible, it is easy to be deformed when fixed into the frame. But manual embroidery is different , it is fixed into a drawing frame first, then they embroider it. So it’s impossible to deform. The high value embroidery does not only need the embroidering technique, but also they need the craftsmen knowledge of painting. Because there is no base picture , only a profile of the picture, for color they need the talent of the craftsman. So a good piece of Chinese Suzhou embroidery is not only imitation, but also includes the talent of the craftsman.
The disordered stitching embroidery has a special requirements on the thickness of thread, but also thread angle is critical. To use the color of the thread to show the bright and dark sides of the picture, they need the crafts man to have a deep understanding of the application of color.
3. The process of the artwork's color and art effect. That means the brightness and color should match well, and transition naturally. Such as an embroidered cat, the most difficult part is the pair of eyes. The craftsman needs more than twenty different colors to transition from one color to another, making the eyes alive and vivid.
An embroidery with high value should have a beautiful pattern, fine needlework, elegant colors, and deep meaning.
This article was written and submitted by Susan Yip, the owner of Su Embroidery Art Studio. If you want to learn more about Chinese embroidery , please visit www.suembroidery.com
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