Design duo Maricor/Maricar used needle and thread to create a colourful cover for this month's net magazine.
Twins Maricor and Maricar create embroidered illustrations, lettering and animations that look like paintings. Maricor explains how the hand-sewn WordPress logo on this month's net magazine cover was put together.
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You use embroidery a lot in your work – what drew you to the medium?
We enjoy working with needle and thread in a less traditional way, we like to think of our style as 'painting with thread'. The ability to blend colours and create a rich palette of colour and texture is something that we love about embroidery.
How did you approach the brief to come up with this design?
net magazine art editor Mike Brennan approached us with the idea of creating an embroidered artwork for the cover which drew inspiration from some of our past work. The idea was to create a burst of flowing colour with the Wordpress logo isolated and silhouetted against the embroidery. We worked with bright colours and wanted to create a lush painterly style for the burst of colour.
In progress
Do you create your embroidery designs on paper or on screen?
We start every project on paper sketching out the designs before we bring them into Photoshop or Illustrator to refine and output a tight mock up for our clients to approve before we start embroidery. Normally we like to colourise our designs with watercolours as we sometimes discover unexpected colour palettes through 'happy accidents' with colours blending in unplanned ways.
What tools do you use? Is it all hand sewn?
Everything is hand sewn so our toolbox consists of needles, cotton thread, sharp scissors, embroidery hoop and floor stand and we normally sew onto cotton quilters fabric. One of the most important equipment we use is a magnifying day light lamp for the all-nighters!
Tanya is a writer covering art, design, and visual effects. She has 16 years of experience as a magazine journalist and has written for numerous publications including 3D World, 3D Artist, ImagineFX, Computer Arts, net magazine, and Creative Bloq. For Creative Bloq, she mostly writes about web design, including the hottest new tools, as well as 3D artwork and VFX.
