Transforming Watercolour into a Weavable Pattern
When Mrs Liu said, “Meiyou, meiyou”, I knew for some daft reason, while it may not have been done before, it must be possible. The trick was how to do it. What tools and notions had to be used and how to find them.
Again, good luck pursued us. After I had identified that a pixel could equal a knot, I hunted down a professional that could teach me how to use Photoshop. He appeared in the guise of the chief graphic designer for the Space Museum in Hong Kong. He had also been on the team that had translated Photoshop into Chinese, so I definitely had my man.
He looked at the watercolours and said that, yes, he thought that he could help me translate them into patterns, perhaps in a month or two, on evenings and weekends. Well, the process actually took six months of hard work figuring out how first to reduce the number of colours of a scan—256—to a weavable number—10 to 20. This had to be accomplished and successfully blending the tones of the watercolours to give the illusion of a bleed. We reduced the colours, and we would lose the subtlety of the design. So, we had to jockey back and forth between significant details and number of colours. Inevitably, it was a losing battle, but once we had a strategy, we could make the best choices to achieve a credible version of the watercolour, and reduce the number of knots for many millions to 1,550,000 knots for a nine foot by 12 foot carpet. There was no one process that achieved this transformation. It was more of a problem of developing
various strategies and then applying them. Much like teaching someone to play a card game. Eventually, I wrote a manual to preserve these strategies that ran over 36 pages.
Once we transformed the design into a weavable number of colours, we needed to put the pattern into a grid that the weavers could follow. This was the traditional manner in which a design was translated into a weaving document, much like a musical score. Several computer programmes made grids, but it was only Adobe Illustrator that had accurate enough lines to put each pixel into a readable grid. Once we printed up the sheets of full-sized carpet patterns, I took these to the workshop in China.
Traditional patterns have black grids on white paper with shapes drawn on them and numbered to indicate which yarns the weavers would use. We presented them with coloured patterns, which proved to be the greatest challenge because each square of the grid indicated a yarn colour in the carpet. Because many of the yarns were very close in value and hue, the pattern had to be different than the coloured yarn and more exaggerated in colour to make it readable. The first sample I delivered was rejected by all the weavers as too confusing, and the only way that sample got made was because the workshop owner, Mr Xu, made the sample himself. Thankfully, he was persistent
enough to take on the task of learning a new way of weaving. But it took six weeks to make a two foot by three foot carpet. Definitely not production speed!
I was very pleased with the result. It proved that this method would achieve the watercolour effect that we were driving toward. The next step was to make several full-sized carpets.
After the first week of his weavers trying to learn this new technique, 50 per cent of the weavers quit. They found it too difficult to use these new coloured patterns. I often remark that it was like taking classical musicians and teaching them jazz. So, I had reached another major obstacle—production.
The remaining weavers were struggling, as well. But if they had committed themselves to continue trying, I offered them double wages for four months, if they persevered in learning the patterns. By the end of the time, they had achieved the normal production speed and actually preferred the new patterns to the old ones because they ultimately became easier to read.
When I went to the inspection of the first order of seven designs and three pieces of each design, I was so happy to see the stunning results that I literally danced on the carpet to the great amusement of all the workshop staff.
“I was so happy to see the stunning results that I literally danced on the carpet—to the great amusement of the staff”
—BRAD DAVIS