Introduction to Photo Embroidery: Create Images with Texture

Gabriela Martínez Ortiz, founder of textile art workshop Ofelia & Antelmo, embroiders through exploring a diverse range of techniques, mediums, and materials with the aim of honoring her cultural and personal roots. Some of her works have been exhibited in several countries.

As well as her vocation as an embroiderer, Gabriela is passionate about photography. In this course, she teaches you how to embroider on paper images to give them a new personal meaning. For your final project, embroider a photograph to create an altogether new composition using flat and raised stitches. Want to delve even deeper into embroidery? Discover Ofelia & Antelmo's previous Domestika courses: Embroidery: Clothing Repair and Designing Handicraft Garments from Scratch.

Start the course by meeting your teacher, Gabriela Martínez Ortiz. She tells you about her career as an embroiderer and creator of the Ofelia & Antelmo textile art workshop. Discover the artists and photographers who inspire her most and also hear some of her recommendations for great books.

Before you start embroidering, get more acquainted with what goes into working with an image as your canvas and the compositional possibilities it offers. Explore the different types of paper and materials needed, and see how to extract interesting color palettes from a photograph.

Now it's time to immerse yourself in the photo embroidery technique! Gabriela teaches you how to do flat and raised stitches, showing you their aesthetic possibilities and some visual examples, then how to make a stitch sampler. Go on to plan the composition for your project and start embroidering.

Hone in on some final details to immortalize your piece, exploring how to present your embroidered photo, and some ways of mounting it to preserve it and help it stand the test of time. Now you've got all the skills to embroider your own story onto a unique canvas.

Create an embroidered photograph or image that includes all the stitches learned in the course.

Anyone who wants to get into hand embroidery as well as anyone interested in exploring new techniques, mediums, and languages that can be communicated through an image.

You don't need any prior knowledge to take this course as your teacher starts from scratch.

For materials you need an image printed on paper and archive material (family or old photos, postcards, old magazines, collages, etc.), embroidery or sewing thread, needles of different thicknesses, scissors, cardboard or foam to serve as a base for punching holes in the paper, and as an optional resource, tracing paper.