Re-embroidering life

Chapter 119: Stitches

Shui Qinghua said she was brewing a new skill, and she wasn't just saying it casually.

Natural embroidery was leaked by Meng Xiu Niang, and Jiang embroidery has extremely strict requirements for its successors. She knew that she could no longer rely on the previous techniques and could only find another way to make a breakthrough. This road was not easy to take. For so long, she had been thinking hard all day long, but she still had no clue.

She also didn't expect that the turning point would come from Ji Zimo, or more precisely, from Ji Wei.

Ji Zimo was also troubled by his lack of progress in painting skills. After entering the Imperial Academy, Fang Hanlin did a lot of publicity for him, which also attracted a lot of hatred. Fortunately, Ji Zimo was very capable and had not been defeated by anyone yet. However, facing the challenges of top talents, he was increasingly unable to cope with them.

It was a day off, Shui Qinghua locked herself in the embroidery pavilion to study new techniques, and ordered him to take care of two-and-a-half-year-old Ji Wei. He had no choice but to leave Ji Wei in the study to play, and concentrate on painting. After drawing a few strokes, he felt that there was no progress, so he crumpled up the paper and threw it away. He drew again, crumpled again, and threw it away again. Soon, the study was full of paper lumps. Ji Zimo seemed to have returned to his "half-crazy" state of the past. He angrily slammed his pen on the table and turned around like a donkey pulling a millstone in the study.

Ji Wei's little head was almost dizzy from being spun around by him, and she protested loudly: "Daddy, stop! Daddy, stop!"

Ji Zimo couldn't hear Ji Wei's shouting. Ji Wei simply ignored her father and climbed up to the big chair with her short legs and stood up. She grabbed the half-dry brush with one hand, and almost lay down on the desk with her little body, scribbling on her father's scroll.

Ji Zimo finally woke up from his dream and rushed forward: "Wei'er, don't move, Daddy has only painted half of the painting with great difficulty!"

Ji Wei threw down her pen, slid down from the chair, and ran off to play by herself.

Ji Zimo resigned himself to tidying up the table messed up by his daughter. He glanced at the scroll and suddenly froze. He found that Wei'er's few random strokes were so wonderful that it seemed as if a window had been opened for him, letting in light.

"Wei'er, tell daddy, why did you draw like this?" Ji Zimo grabbed his daughter and asked anxiously.

Wei'er seemed not to understand and impatiently broke free from him, concentrating on playing the nine-ring game.

Ji Zimo returned to his desk and fell into deep thought while looking at the smudged scroll.

From that day on, Ji Zimo also locked himself in his study all day, repeatedly pondering Ji Weitian's strokes, and constantly trying to incorporate this new perspective into his paintings. He found that when painting from this perspective, the picture was no longer flat, but became concave and convex three-dimensional.

He was originally good at freehand painting, pursuing the haziness and etherealness of artistic conception. Until two years ago, he changed his style and focused more on realism. However, many technical problems could not be solved, resulting in his realistic paintings always having a feeling of hanging in mid-air, which was ridiculed by the Hanlin scholars as being out of place.

Now, it was as if a fire was ignited in his heart, and he decided to make a brand new attempt. His brushstrokes no longer lightly outlined the artistic conception, but delicately and accurately depicted every detail, striving to truly reproduce the scene in front of him. This transformation was not smooth sailing, and he often forgot to eat and sleep in order to capture the accurate light and shadow and proportion, but he had a hunch that he would soon be able to make a breakthrough.

Ji Zimo's changes also deeply inspired Shui Qinghua. After witnessing the innovations in Ji Zimo's paintings, Shui Qinghua came up with a bold idea: to invent an embroidery method that is more realistic than natural embroidery, fully presenting the light and dark contrast in Ji Zimo's paintings, and making the scenery in the embroidery more three-dimensional.

In the next few months, Shui Qinghua devoted almost all his energy to the research of new acupuncture techniques.

At first, she tried to change the arrangement of the silk threads. In the past, the needlework was neat and orderly, with smooth lines. Now, in order to present the contrast between light and dark, she boldly disrupted the direction of the silk threads. The result was not ideal, and the embroidery looked messy and had no aesthetic appeal.

She kept flipping through books on painting and embroidery, trying to find inspiration. During the day, she was busy in front of the embroidery frame, adjusting the needlework and the use of silk thread again and again. At night, under the candlelight, she repeatedly pondered the results of the day, recording the experience and lessons of each attempt. The embroidery room was filled with discarded embroidery and papers with dense writing.

One day, when she passed by a wood shop, she saw a craftsman carving a piece of wood. The craftsman was surrounded by the aroma of sawdust and noisy voices. The carving knife in his hand moved randomly on the wood, seemingly without any rules, but soon, a lifelike image emerged. Shui Qinghua stared blankly for a long time, and suddenly her heart moved, as if she had realized something.

Back in the embroidery room, she sat in front of the embroidery frame again. This time, she no longer deliberately pursued rules, but let her thoughts follow her feelings. The embroidery needle flew up and down in her hands, and the silk threads were like agile elves, intertwining in clusters. She no longer thought about the limitations of traditional needlework, but focused on using silk threads to express the light and shadow and three-dimensional effects in her mind.

After countless days and nights of hard work, finally, on a quiet afternoon, Shui Qinghua completed a piece of embroidery using a completely new needlework technique under the warm and soft sunlight.

Her needlework varies in length and direction, crossing each other. The embroidery is divided into three layers. The first layer is coloring, covering a layer of base color according to the outline and color blocks of the embroidery draft. The second layer is fine-tuned, embroidering the large area and the objects at the back first, and then the small area and the objects at the front. Each time she does something, she has to take into account the relationship between the whole and each object. The third layer is fine-tuning, focusing on the changes in lines, light and color, using different colors and shades of color lines to unify the light and color on the entire embroidery surface.

As the layers are stacked up, the colors become richer, and the more obvious change is the light. Traditional embroidery works appear dull in a slightly dark environment, while the new works are more light-changing, or in other words, have their own light. In terms of the use of silk thread, the new silk thread she invented has achieved 24 threads in one split, and the new embroidery rule has gone a step further, requiring 48 threads in one split to achieve the most delicate light and shadow effect.

When she put down the needle and stared at the embroidery in front of her, she felt like crying, as if a traveler had traveled thousands of miles and finally saw an oasis on the horizon. The flowers in the embroidery seemed to bloom from the fabric, the veins of the leaves were clearly visible, and the transition of light and shadow was natural and realistic. She knew that after all the hardships, she had finally succeeded in inventing a new needlework.

"It's embroidery done with random stitches, but there is order in the disorder. So I'll call you random stitch embroidery." She said to herself as she looked at the embroidery with a smile.