Quality Comparison

The thickness of the silk thread is an important aspect of each work of Silk Art. One silk thread can be divided into 16 individual strands, the smallest, finer than a human hair. A good rule-of-thumb is the thinner the silk, the finer the quality of the Silk Art.

Overall, the affect of Silk Art is similar to Pointillism. Up close you can see each of the tiny stitches and marvel at the design and execution of such detailed work, but when you step back, you are enthralled by the beauty of the image created.

The quality of a piece is primarily identified by the strand count used to create the art. You can have a one strand piece, two strand piece, four strand piece, eight strand piece or sixteen strand piece. Only a tiny handful of people can stitch using a single strand.
The single strand is so delicate the slightest inadvertent movement can break it.

Single strand pieces are rare and very expensive, ranging in the thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars. While some Master Artists can work in single strand, this is generally the realm of Grand Master Artists. The result is a near-photographic realism for the nature-based pieces, and expression and emotion for the conceptual works.

We categorize our art as:

Medium – 8 Strands
Fine – 4 Strands
Very fine – 2 Strands
Ultra fine – 1 Strand, single

The two images below, give some perspective on thread thickness.

Long stitches are faster and easier, short stitches are more time consuming. Quality is directly impacted by the stitching. It is how the artist controls the overall imaging but also the interaction with light and shadows. Stitching can be so small you can not even determined it has been stitched. The smaller the stitching, the higher quality of art.

Only carefully-dyed, pure silk is used in our Silk Art. We use thousands of different shades of color. The wide variety of tones and shades used by our artists, allow them to create shading and dimension bringing the silk embroidery artwork to life. The same images may made in different sizes and quality levels. Usually, the larger canvases will use a greater variety of colors. With few exceptions, very detailed and colorful artwork will need to be made in larger sizes.

Silk artists vary the length and thickness of stitches, layering them one on top of one another to create depth of perspective. The Silk Art creation process is different from paintings. When an artist creates an image in silk, each of the individual fibers and their color remain intact. Where a painter would blend the paints to create the exact affect desired, a silk embroidery artist must blend the colors by layering them. The effect is to control exposure of color, depth of perspective, lighting and shadowing, creating an effect not replicated in any other form of art.  The more skilled an artist is at layering and stitching the more dynamic the interaction with light. This is a key measurement of quality called Visual Depth.

Some simple pieces may have 3 or 4 layers of stitches; larger works might have ten times that amount. When a Silk Artist creates a very complicated landscape, it has more layers of stitches than are completely visible, building and blending the colors to replicate nature as closely as possible. The same piece of art can become the forest in morning sun, to mid-day, to evening and even all the way to moonlight. It is truly spectacular and beautiful.