Designing and Digitizing

Digitizing your own designs can be great fun and a rewarding hobby or a very lucrative business. Almost anyone can learn to use a basic embroidery digitizing program fairly quickly and easily, even without a tutorial, but that doesn’t always mean that the end result will be a design that embroiders well. There are many basic principals that apply to digitizing designs, with the five main principals listed below. However, even if you do not digitize, these principles apply equally well to thread selection and design placement or even changing colours when editing designs.

Detail

The level of detail in a design requires a delicate balance. The eye loves to feast on detail; however, detail also fatigues the eye. To educate your own eye, closely examine designs that you consider have lovely details without being overdone. Resources other than embroidery designs are wallpaper, rugs, carved wood, fabric, architectural elements and botanical prints. Notice how the detail advances and accents the design without overpowering the main elements.

Rhythm   

Can your eyes dance to it? Do the curves, straight lines and masses draw your eye through the whole of the design in a pleasing rather than a non-fluid manner? Look at one of the suggestions mentioned previously and pay attention to the movements of your own eyes. Watch a flower blowing in a light breeze and see how the wind makes the flower dance. This movement can be visible when digitizing designs by the angles of objects.

Value  

Value is something commonly referred to in quilting and refers to the relative darkness of a colour from darkest to lightest. Use a quilter’s red value finder to check your colour. The value finder washes out the colours, which can confuse any eye. Remember that the eye will stop at the greatest contrast. Since the eye will stop there, be careful where you place the combination of "the darkest dark next to the lightest light". Do not have this combination too close to the center, unless you want a target effect in your design. Do not have it too close to the edge of the design or your design will appear unbalanced.

Contrast

There are certain colours that contrast more pleasingly to the eye. The strongest contrasts are opposite colours on a colour wheel. Because there are three primary colours, the main contrasts always occur between a primary colour and a secondary colour. A secondary colour is made up of equal amounts of the two adjacent primary colours.

 

The primary colours are red, blue and yellow.

Secondary colours are green (a combination of yellow and blue), orange (a combination of red and yellow) and purple (a combination of red and blue).

When using colour decide if your design will be warm colours. Cool colours should be added for the contrast effect. And if your design is cool colours, add a very limited amount of warm colours for contrast, but remember that warm colours will overwhelm cool colours. What are the warm and cool colours? Warm colours immediately make you think of the sun. That will be all of your warm colours, reds and oranges and yellows. What are the cool colours? Think of the shade and cool places – the blues and the greens and the purples. These would be your cool colours. Going into more detail the purples can run into being a warm or a cool purple. With more reds it could be considered warm purple. Or with lots of blue it could be a really cold colour. The final colour choices are what you find pleasing, because usually what you find pleasing is what will be most effective. When digitizing, if you are not pleased with your colour choices, no matter how superior the design is you will never be satisfied with the design.

Lines and Shapes    

In order for a design not to appear static or flat, things must vary within it. Lines should not all be the same size; some should be thinner or thicker. Shapes should not all be the same size, some should be larger and some will be smaller. Shapes should not all be the same type, some will be round or oval, some will be square or rectangular and some will be irregular. Pay particular attention to negative shapes, which are the spaces created by the arrangements of main shapes. Make them interesting and varied and avoid obvious circles, equilateral triangles or squares because they can create "holes" in the designs where the eye will stop. Too much detail in a small area will cause your machine to pound in one position, the thread may break or fray and you may experience needle breakage. A large design can have much more detail than a small design. Watch the curves especially where they meet another line. A balance of curves and straight lines is important to create a pleasing design.