A year or so ago, I held a little exhibition as part of a scientific conference, and showed a lot of designs based on biological subjects. These proved very popular, and I’m still getting requests and commissions from biologists who like my artistic interpretations of science. One recent commission was for a little school of zebrafish. These are pretty little fish which can be bred to produce all sorts of interesting colours and patterns. They are popular subjects for geneticists to study, and my client wanted a gift to present to a colleague of hers who had just published a big paper on zebrafish genetics
They’re really very shiny…
I’d done zebrafish designs before so these weren’t difficult to do. The only new thing about them was the use of Mylar, overstitched in different colors to make the fish’s bodies. (If you’re not familiar with it, Mylar is a shiny plastic film which can give a beautiful sheen and shimmer to embroideries.) It is VERY frustrating, but neither scans nor photographs can really reproduce the shine of Mylar and metallic threads, so you will just have to take my word for it when I say that these fish glitter very nicely, and the shine gives an extra dimension to the piece. I almost decided not to post this picture, just because the real embroidery is so different from the rather boring photograph. But if you have a good imagination, maybe you can picture to yourself how they really look