Have
you ever wondered how a designer decides on the size of the finished picture? For my designs, it comes down to
fingers! Since everything is outlined in
black and then colored in -- a feature common in medieval art -- all my fingers
require 3 squares: one flesh-colored for the finger and one in black on each
side to outline it.
Sometimes delineating all the fingers will make the final design just too big, in which case the poor person will be relieved of a finger or two.
Feathers, like fingers,
can only be reduced so far. The
narrowest feather needs the same space as a finger and will thereby determine
the final size of the winged creature.
Beyond
fingers and feathers, a design more or less tells me what size it should be,
what size suits the proportions of the original, what size is not so huge that
someone would never stitch it. For
example, for my own pleasure I am working on 1/3 of a woodcut picture of Basel
which is going to be rather large assuming it ever gets finished. I have stitched Very Large designs and
enjoyed them, but for the most part I think we all like something that we can
count on finishing in a reasonable amount of time, yes?
