Originally Posted by
loisf
That is so amazing! Forty thousand squares! You did a fantastic job. I'm sorry I can't help with how to quilt or stabilize it, but it is truly impressive. Did you have a computer generated picture that helped with your choice of colors for each pixel, or did you choose? Beautiful work.
I used a computer program to render a photo of his face into the fabrics I was using (with a bit of improvisation here and there for creativity)
I did this by cutting a 1-inch sample swatch of all of my fabrics and scanning them into my computer. I saved them in a folder as "001.jpg 002.jpg 003.jpg" etc. This way, the program knew what fabrics I had to use and could generate the pattern based on the parameters I set. It took a few rendering tries, but I finally got a pattern that I liked.
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- odd jpg repeats in the background means the program isn't understanding "black" correctly
- colours are too muddy
- contrast is too sharp at the edge of the face
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- Very grainy
- Don't like the crop of the image, I would have been wasting so much time on boring background
- Shadows on the face are sharp and aren't rendering correctly
These were two early test renders. (they are very shrunk down, the original .JPG images I render are ENORMOUS and I could never upload them to the internet) You can see in both of them the computer was struggling to adapt the colours of the photograph to my fabric swatches. The first one had odd repeats in teh background, and the second came out muddy and grainy. It was just a matter of finding the right source photo with good lighting and contrast and finding the correct settings to render it.
This is what my pattern looks like when zoomed in
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Of course, the pattern I work from is still mcuh larger than this so I can see which swatches I'm using when I create my blocks, but you get the idea. It repeats the same swatch in its proper position, and I follow the pattern.