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I finished the test pattern.
Quarter included for size comparison, because the picture makes it look WHOA large and ha ha, no. The finished mini-patch up there is 1⅛" across and 1⅜" high. Mini indeed. Almost anticlimactic for two days of work. :/
All right. So. Some thoughts:
I mentioned how much I liked C-LON thread as opposed to the Nymo brand I've been using, oh, all my damn life. I mostly decided to try the C-Lon because they carried it in olive green and I thought it would go better with the beads than the flat black I usually get. It turned out to be an excellent choice color-wise as it blends quite well with the other shades of yellow-green I'm using. Other things I was impressed with were the smoothness and strength of the thread. I had very little tangling (usually I'm picking out small knots every few beads or so), and it's able to withstand quite a bit of tugging and pulling and being shoved through beads multiple times without fraying or worse, breaking. I didn't have a single break the entire pattern, which is unheard of, even in something small, the Nymo would fray and break if I looked at it funny. I found myself using wax pretty sparingly and only really at the beginning of a thread segment, mostly to iron out the curlies initially and to get the end through the bitsy needle eye (I'm going to need to invest in a needle threader. I'm going to go fucking blind otherwise). All of this leads to me being quite happy with switching brands. I think I'll stick with this.
This is the first time I'm working with a uniform finish/lining. Previously, my primary concern was matching the color needed and not paying so much attention to the finish/lining/transparency of the beads. Because of this, all of my previous work has been a hodgepodge of just whatever colors were available, and while the Witch and Bowser still look quite excellent despite this, I think if I were ever to redo either pattern I'd be sure to pick a uniform finish - probably a luster or alabaster one for the Witch, and a uniform silver-line one for Bowser. I mean they both still look excellent, but I'm seeing an advantage to matching the finishes as well. This test looks... IDK, more professional, I guess? than both of them. Definitely a step up in my craft, anyway.
With regard to the finish itself, I think I made a good choice in the silver lined beads. The reflective shine to them seems appropriate to the project, even if it does make the color/pattern a little hard to see under direct, harsh light. (Photographing these is going to be a right bitch.) A nice surprise with them is that they are anything but opaque and thus the patch looks quite lovely either backlit or held against a light background.. Not accurate to the Game Boy mechanics, but who is paying attention, right?
So far my only concern with this is that while they are fairly distinct colors from each other if you put the vials side by side, the two lightest shades I'm working with look alarmingly the same in practice. You can't really tell that the outer rim is yellow and the "a" in ARBT is a pale lime in the pattern. Granted in the patterns there isn't very much of a distinction between the two, nor, in fact, should there be, but there should be at least be a discenable difference. Thinking of doing another test specifically to determine if there is actually enough of a distinction - maybe picking a small bit of the larger patterns to isolate and bead by itself. If it turns out okay I'm sure someone'll want a tiny patch of game as opposed to a big honking huge one.
Wellp, that's enough bead blather out of me.
Quarter included for size comparison, because the picture makes it look WHOA large and ha ha, no. The finished mini-patch up there is 1⅛" across and 1⅜" high. Mini indeed. Almost anticlimactic for two days of work. :/
All right. So. Some thoughts:
I mentioned how much I liked C-LON thread as opposed to the Nymo brand I've been using, oh, all my damn life. I mostly decided to try the C-Lon because they carried it in olive green and I thought it would go better with the beads than the flat black I usually get. It turned out to be an excellent choice color-wise as it blends quite well with the other shades of yellow-green I'm using. Other things I was impressed with were the smoothness and strength of the thread. I had very little tangling (usually I'm picking out small knots every few beads or so), and it's able to withstand quite a bit of tugging and pulling and being shoved through beads multiple times without fraying or worse, breaking. I didn't have a single break the entire pattern, which is unheard of, even in something small, the Nymo would fray and break if I looked at it funny. I found myself using wax pretty sparingly and only really at the beginning of a thread segment, mostly to iron out the curlies initially and to get the end through the bitsy needle eye (I'm going to need to invest in a needle threader. I'm going to go fucking blind otherwise). All of this leads to me being quite happy with switching brands. I think I'll stick with this.
This is the first time I'm working with a uniform finish/lining. Previously, my primary concern was matching the color needed and not paying so much attention to the finish/lining/transparency of the beads. Because of this, all of my previous work has been a hodgepodge of just whatever colors were available, and while the Witch and Bowser still look quite excellent despite this, I think if I were ever to redo either pattern I'd be sure to pick a uniform finish - probably a luster or alabaster one for the Witch, and a uniform silver-line one for Bowser. I mean they both still look excellent, but I'm seeing an advantage to matching the finishes as well. This test looks... IDK, more professional, I guess? than both of them. Definitely a step up in my craft, anyway.
With regard to the finish itself, I think I made a good choice in the silver lined beads. The reflective shine to them seems appropriate to the project, even if it does make the color/pattern a little hard to see under direct, harsh light. (Photographing these is going to be a right bitch.) A nice surprise with them is that they are anything but opaque and thus the patch looks quite lovely either backlit or held against a light background.. Not accurate to the Game Boy mechanics, but who is paying attention, right?
So far my only concern with this is that while they are fairly distinct colors from each other if you put the vials side by side, the two lightest shades I'm working with look alarmingly the same in practice. You can't really tell that the outer rim is yellow and the "a" in ARBT is a pale lime in the pattern. Granted in the patterns there isn't very much of a distinction between the two, nor, in fact, should there be, but there should be at least be a discenable difference. Thinking of doing another test specifically to determine if there is actually enough of a distinction - maybe picking a small bit of the larger patterns to isolate and bead by itself. If it turns out okay I'm sure someone'll want a tiny patch of game as opposed to a big honking huge one.
Wellp, that's enough bead blather out of me.
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