Hand Embroidered Animated Background

Helloooo! I finally have another new piece of animation to share- yay! It was November last year since I last completed a moving clip. So, yes, new work is still going quite slowly, but that’s not to say I’m not working on anything bigger behind the scenes (more on that in another post)…

If you’re a regular here, then you’ll know that embroidery is quite a big thing in my life at the moment. So naturally, I wanted to test out how an embroidered background would look against some animation drawn digitally. Back in February I started a short animated clip of someone walking up some stairs- just to kind of get me going again after having worked on a 16 month contract as an editor. I liked what I created for the character side of it, but I was really struggling to know what to do for the background. I have had the thought in my head for a while of trying an embroidered background, so a few weeks later, I put two and two together and decided that’s what I’ll do to finish this piece!

The hoop was big- like 12 inches big, so of course it took it’s sweet time to complete. But I do really enjoy the process of embroidery, I find it super relaxing and love just sticking on a podcast or album as I watch my fabric laboriously take shape and become a picture!

The original background was quite boring in my opinion- a grey wall, which didn’t feel that appealing to make an embroidery of. So I decided to ‘jazz it up’ a bit and make the wall at the back into bricks, using a colour scheme of five different threads. I personally think the result looks really vibrant and eye catching.

The original background

The background I created

At first when I comped the animation and background together, they didn’t really gel that well, but after drawing in a shadow under the feet, it really tied the piece together and integrated the background with the foreground animation nicely. This definitely has potential as a way to go about creating backgrounds for a longer project in the future. I am also thinking of a few ideas for a fully embroidered animation. And yes, I am a bit mad. But I am inundated with various project ideas currently, so I think they’ll have to come before this one! Anyway, as usual, keep your eyes out on here for all my latest project updates/ ramblings etc! Here’s the animation: