Posted by dravon in Conventions, Featured, Project Review | Comments Off on Corvo Embroidered
Corvo Embroidered
Been a while since I’ve posted anything here, but that does not mean I’ve been lolly gagging about. Far from it. I’m working very hard to build up the embroidery side of my business, and while the majority of that is aimed at business clients, there are still plenty of truly fun and creative things I get asked to do. This one has far and away been the most fun!! I’ll be cross posting this particular post not only here but also on my DW Embroidery blog since it will be total brag. The rest of the posts in this Corvo series will be essentially post-mortem, covering all the mistakes I made and the lessons I learned. So if you want to learn from my mistakes on how to create multi-hooped goldwork embroidery directly onto leather so that that the finished piece is exactly sized for the pattern it needs to go on, then stick around here. Those posts will be right here since they are sewing/embroidery education posts and not necessarily marketing posts.
What am I talking about? Some friends of mine (Brayton and Amy over at Legendary Costume Works) were working with Rebecca Dominguez (pattern maker extraordinaire for the movie and tv industry) on an assignment which needed some embroidery. I was recommended since I’m familiar with working with leather and I’ve also worked with metallic thread. The assignment they were working on was to make the promotional outfit for the upcoming game “Dishonored 2” with the main character of Corvo. It was his outfit that they were making. I am thrilled and proud of the final product for which I played my part. The finished outfit was officially unveiled at E3 in Los Angeles when it opened on June 14, 2016.
Now I did not got to the event, but I have friends who did and they were kind enough to snag some photos for me. Above is the entire outfit, with the black leather vest which I embroidered peaking out from the under the brown hooded over vest. I used one of Dishonored 2’s promotional pictures as the featured image for this post, so you can see how pretty much exact to the vision of the character the final project came out to be.
Here is it from another angle. I just love Rebecca’s ability to work asymmetrical designs! I’m so going to have her create initial patterns for me from now on. I’ve learned the hard way that while I can make patterns, it’s just not fun for me. She loves making them. Problem solved! But I digress. I asked Rebecca for a picture of the black leather under-vest so the embroidery could be seen better in its entirety. She sent me this picture. To reiterate, the only part of this project that I did was the embroidery onto the leather pieces. The actual assembly was done by the parties cited.
The filigree work is embroidered directly onto the leather. The edging work was embroidered onto black material which was then stitched/glued into place. I’m not exactly sure how Rebecca ended up fitting the gold metal edgework into position, but it is exactly form fitting to the contours of the pattern – no bias cheating here!
Overall, it looked AWESOME!! And boy did I learn a whole lot about working with metal on leather. Fun!!! The end result? SEXY! You have a job for me? Bring it! I want more of this.
I think I’ll break down the rest of the posts I want to do into two. The first one will be how I created the artwork into an exactly sized piece which would literally be the pattern piece in the end. That means I’ll be covering how the pattern was supplied to me, how I scaled it, and what I had to do to get the artwork to fit in the parameters of the pattern. The next post be on how I ultimately learned how to create the multi-hooped digitized artwork so that the individual pieces would seamless fit together. The last post will be how I combatted dropped stitches in order to get the density and fill that I wanted. My first attempt at this was abysmal and embarrassing, but I learned that leather can be hella embroidered without fear. So that’s 3 posts to come highlighting what was learned on this piece.
Now to tackle that embroidered corset…
Until next time, happy sewing!
– Dravon
