Embroidered portrait for Pepito 🐶 || Retrato bordado para Pepito 🐶

English:

Greetings to everyone!
I wish you a happy start of the week

Meet Pepito, he is my aunt's puppy. He is quite a playful, affectionate and energetic little dog, see that tender little face? It looks like he's always asking for food (or affection). Today I'll show you the process of my attempt to make an embroidered portrait of this adorable creature that has filled my afternoons with joy ♥

To guide me and to be able to trace the drawing, I edited the photo in picsart with a filter called "Sketchy".

With the help of the edited image, I was able to trace from the screen to have a basis of how to start the drawing.

From there, I kept drawing guided by the photo, trying to highlight the dark parts, as well as the light ones and the hairs that stand out more.

I'm not very good at drawing, I don't follow any technique to do it, I just let myself go and draw where I think I should do it. I do the best I can, don't judge me.

When passing the drawing on the fabric, I already knew it was going to be a somewhat complicated work. This is the second pet portrait I've done, this is supposed to be a practice, but I don't know if it's a good idea to practice embroidery on such a furry dog.

These are the yarns I used, in black, gray, light gray and little bit of white color.

I started first by making the most essential lines, such as the edges, eyes and nose. During all work I just do back stitches.

Continuing, I highlighted some of the darker parts and the more prominent hairs.

I had already been embroidering for a couple of hours, and during all that time I felt uncomfortable seeing the empty eyes, so I had to embroider them before continuing. They say that when doing a portrait the first thing to do is the eyes, since that is where the life and essence of the person being portrayed is concentrated. I will apply it next time.

I started to get a little nervous as I added more detail, as I felt the stitches were not going in the right direction. Also, when I tried to use the light gray yarn for the muzzle hair, I realized that you could see the stitches where the needle went through. This stressed me out a bit, but I decided to go ahead since from a distance this was not very noticeable.

I really liked this technique of using light and dark colors to play with depth, I hope I can keep practicing it until I get it right. Also, Pepito has a lot of hair, both black and white, it wouldn't have looked good to do the lines only with black.

I had been embroidering for about 7 hours when I decided to stop. I felt like I was adding details and details and still couldn't get it to look the way I wanted it to, so I decided to finish the ears and call it a day. It's better to know when to stop, otherwise I could have overloaded the embroidery and still not achieved my goal.

This is the end result!

Despite not being very satisfied with the result, I'm happy to have done it. Each work done is something that enriches us in experience ♥️ what I liked the most was the result of the eyes, I feel that they look at me asking for affection, just like Pepito would do.

Thank you for reading ♥️

If you are interested in embroidery, I invite you to follow me. I usually upload tutorials and processes of my projects.

All photographs were taken by me and belong to me.

The text was translated from English to Spanish with the help of Deepl's translator.

See you next time!