I've been working on knash's original suggestion, using the "It could be like this..." scene, but have run into a couple of technical problems, which are not insoluable, but which need some thought. The easy one first: there's a
lot of background and (except for the fire) it's very dark. My thought here is to
A) round off the corners, so it's an oval rather than a rectangle,
plusB) use half cross stitch for most of the background [
technical explanation below] which will lighten it,
plusC) skip stitches out toward the edges to sort of feather the scene into the fabric.
Technical explanation: Normal cross stitch is two stitches, one over the other, like an X. If you only use one stitch, like a slash /, that's half cross stitch.I blocked out the motto, and inserted the picture (from Striped Wall, and slightly lightened), and overlaid a grid. Thusly:
...Which brings me to the second problem: scale. This design is about 8x10, with 14 stitches to the inch. And Jack's face only comprises about 26 stitches, which is not enough for any expression, or even enough to make him recognizable. So I tried changing the project's orientation from landscape to portrait (which takes away from the "Home Sweet Home" look), and came up with this:
...which is a little better, but still not enough for much detail on the faces, as you can see by this sample which shows how much detail you get using one color for each block:
That can be sharpened up a bit with the judicious use of backstitching--but not sharpened up a lot.
So. possible solutions to this problem:
1. Make it bigger, say 14x20.
(downside: will take much longer to do, both charting and stitching)2. Use smaller stitches, say 18 or even 22 to the inch.
(downside: same as above)3. Combination of 1 & 2: somewhat bigger
and somewhat smaller stitches.
(downside: same as 1 & 2 above)4. Just ignore it--we all recognize the scene, and the message will be the same to viewers, even if they can't recognize jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger.
(downside: We'd miss those great expressions.)5. Use a different picture--a close-up with their heads closer together. But which one?
(downside: we want the screencap that goes with the motto.)6. ?? suggestions ??