I’ve spent the last week or so working on the cyborg design. It’s technically very challenging. That’s because weaving a realistic human face is not easy!
While we humans have only vague ideas of what most objects look like, we are VERY familiar with human faces. In fact, our brains are physically wired to recognize and “read” human faces. That means that, if you want to produce a convincing human face, you need to be spot on about things like skin color, facial features, and proportions.
So I’ve been doing a lot of digital swatching to come up with yarn colors.
The first step in this swatching is to come up with a starting palette. I sampled the colors in the image I’m weaving, looking for colors that would mix into the colors I wanted.
Here’s the image I’m weaving. (The head is human-looking on both left and right sides because I will be sewing on the cyborg parts later.)
Then I selected five colors from the image. In the double satin structure I’m using, I can use multiple wefts together, so I constructed a set of swatches that shows all the mixes of 1-2 weft colors, like this.
(Top and left rows show the original color palette; the other rows show combinations of those colors.)
That gave me some ideas of what the weft colors would look like when blended (in practice the blends are not nearly so neat), but didn’t account for the black warp color. Because of the structure, black would blend with the weft colors. I could have 20%, 40%, 60%, or 80% black on the surface, with the weft color making up the rest.
To simulate this, I added a black overlay in Photoshop, with black stripes at 20%, 40%, 60%, and 80% opacity. The overlay (by itself) looked like this:
Placing the black overlay over the extended color palette gave four shades for every weft color combination – 20% black, 40% black, 60% black, and 80% black, for a total of 15 x 4 = 60 possible colors.
However, if I tried to use 60 colors, especially nearly-identical colors, in a palette, I’d drive myself crazy (for a variety of technical reasons that I won’t get into here). So I winnowed them down to 18 colors:
Then I told Photoshop to simplify the image to a version containing only those colors:
It’s pretty good. You can see some graininess in the photo, especially around the tip of the nose, but it’s not bad.
I wasn’t entirely satisfied, though, as I felt the face didn’t have the glow of the original. Mixing in the black had darkened and reduced the saturation of the face. So I went back and created a new palette, with colors just a trifle more saturated and lighter than the previous set.
The new palette did significantly better – the version of the photo using that palette is below – so I decided to roll with it.
(This is not what the final design will look like, however. Woven designs have MUCH lower resolution than digital images, so a lot of detail will be “lost in translation”.)
Now I needed to find yarns of the right colors to make up the palette. It would essentially be impossible to source these commercially: the colors would have to be nearly precise matches, and the odds of finding them in the limited commercial palette are essentially zero.
To the dye samples!!
I dyed 1500 samples of yarn in various Procion MX color combinations a while back – you can see them here. This gives me an exceptionally large palette to choose from – still doesn’t cover the entire color gamut, but I get quite a bit of selection when I flip through my books.
I was in luck! There were not one, but TWO palettes that looked like they might work:
I think I could work with either of these. The bottom set of samples is truer to the colors of the original palette, but (like the original image) that palette doesn’t seem quite Asian enough for me. Too much pink and not enough yellow. The top set of samples has a more yellowish cast, which I think might mimic Asian skin better.
My plan is to dye all six colors, weave up samples, and see which I like best.
I had originally planned to weave using 20/2 silk, which is about the size I wanted, but there’s a hitch: silk dyes differently from cotton. The colors shift, sometimes dramatically. So if I wanted to dye silk, I’d have to do samples to test the dye formulas, adjust as needed, do more samples, etc. Time is short and silk is expensive, so I think I’ve decided to take the quicker path and use a cellulose fiber – probably mercerized cotton.
I’m still debating what size yarn to use, and will likely weave up samples in both 20/2 and 10/2 cotton. There are a lot of technical questions that will need resolving, so I think I’ll start by weaving samples to test yarn sizes. After that I’ll wind and dye my skeins, and start testing colors.
Meanwhile, of course, there’s the electronics to consider. I’m reading through Adafruit’s (lengthy) document about all the different LED products they carry, and am thinking about how to design the cyborg half as well.
And, of course, continuing my powerlifting workouts. In my fantaaaaaaabulous new belt, which arrived last week! I think it’s amazing, and can’t wait to wear it at my meet in San Diego on August 23.
It will go very nicely with my powerlifting competition gear:
Because if you’re going to look like a squashed sausage (“I look good in a wrestling singlet,” said no human ever), you might as well look like a FABULOUS squashed sausage!
