Many other distinct kinds of work might be mentioned, such as needlework pictures, the story-telling embroideries that can be made so particularly attractive. Embroidered landscapes, formal gardens, mysterious woods, views of towns and palaces, are, if rightly treated, very fine. In order to learn the way to work such subjects we must go to the XVIth and XVIIth century petit point pictures, and to the detail in fine tapestries. The wrong method of going to work is to imitate the effect sought after by the painter.
It is a mistake in embroidery design to be too naturalistic. In painting it may be the especial aim to exactly imitate nature, but here are wanted embroidery flowers, animals and figures, possessing the character and likeness of the things represented, but in no way trying to make us believe that they are real. The semblance of a bumble bee crawling upon the tea cloth gives a hardly pleasant sensation and much savours of the practical joke, which is seldom in good taste; the needle, however, adds convention to almost anything, and will usually manage the bee all right unless the worker goes out of the way to add a shadow and a high light. Such things as perspective, light and shade or modelling of form, should all be very much simplified if not avoided, for embroidery conforms to the requirements of decoration and must not falsify the surface that it ornaments. Shading is made use of in order to give more variety to, and exhibit the beauty of, colour by means of gradation, to explain more clearly the design, and so on; it is not employed for the purpose of fixing the lighting of the composition from one point by means of systematically adjusted light and shade, or of making a form stand out so realistically as to almost project from the background.
In avoiding too much resemblance to natural forms it is not necessary to make things ugly; a conventional flower implies no unmeaning straightness or impossible curve, it may keep all its interesting characteristics, but it has to obey other requirements specially necessary in the particular design. Another point to be noted is that, since there is freedom of choice of flowers and other objects, only those perfect and well-formed should be chosen; all accidents of growth and disease may, happily, be omitted; if anything of this kind is put in it helps to give the naturalistic look which is to be avoided. Both sides of a leaf should match, though it may happen in nature, through misfortune, that one is deformed and small.
In figure work, which, though ambitious, is one of the most interesting kinds of embroidery, the figures, like all other things, must be treated with a certain amount of simplicity; very little attempt must be made to obtain flesh tones, roundness of form, perspective, or foreshortening. The work should be just sufficiently near to nature to be a good embroidery rendering of it. However, without overstepping the limits there is a great deal that may be expressed, such things as character, gesture, grace, colour, and so on, matters which are after all of first importance. Detail, if of the right kind, may be filled in, but it is wrong to attempt what is to the craft very laborious to obtain, for this would be misdirected energy, which is great waste. A right use of the figure can be seen in the XIIIth century embroidery pictures, which, covering mediæval church vestments, often display episodes from the lives of the saints. These are some of the masterpieces of the art of embroidery; observation of nature is carried to a marvellous pitch, but the execution never sinks into commonplace realism.
Certain restrictions are always present, in making a design, that must be conformed to, such as, the limit of space, the materials with which the work is to be carried out, the use to which it will be put, and so on. These, instead of being difficulties, can afford help in the way of suggestion and limitation. A bad design may look as if it obeyed them unwillingly—a form is perhaps cramped, perhaps stretched out in order to fit its place, instead of looking as if it naturally fitted it whether the confining lines were there or not. In the early herbals, illustrated with woodcuts, examples can be found over and over again of a flower filling a required space simply and well; [fig. 23] is taken from the herbal of Carolus Clusius, printed at Antwerp in 1601 by the great house of Plantin. The draughtsman in this case had to draw a plant to fit a standard-sized engraver's block, and he had a certain number of facts to tell about it; he drew the plant as simply and straightforwardly as possible, making good use of all the available space, the result being a well-planned and balanced piece of work, with no affectation or unnecessary lines about it.
Fine colour is a quality appreciated at first sight, though often unconsciously. It is a difficult subject to speak of very definitely; an eye for colour is natural to some, but in any case the faculty can be cultivated and developed. By way of studying the subject, we can go to nature and learn as much as we are capable of appreciating; even such things as butterflies, shells, and birds' eggs are suggestive. Again, embroideries, illuminated manuscripts, pictures, painted decoration, may be studied, and so on; in fact, colour is so universal that it is not possible to get away from it. Unfortunately we are sometimes forced to learn what to avoid as well as what to emulate.