Fine art embroidery

Lesley Wood, Furnished with Memories (detail) When Lesley Wood inherited her mother's cross stitch stash and tried to replicate her own fine art paintings on fabric, she was frustrated that her stitches were thick and clumsy. Not to be deterred, she joined her local Embroiderers' Guild, and in a few short years became an award winning textile artist.

Embroidered Biology Diagrams, inside women’s bodies. Sophie New, 2013

Until she went to college to study fine art, Ailish Henderson had never picked up a needle. No amount of encouragement from her mother who sewed quite a bit

Moscow-based fabric artist and designer Katerina Marchenko stitches brightly colored threads into tulle to form elaborate embroidered images of animals, portraits, and anatomical studies. In their hoops, Marchenko’s pieces work as framed thread paintings. Bird and angel wings appear to have dimension and human eyes pop thanks to the artist’s attention to color harmony and shading. Marchenko skips the sketching phase and starts each new piece with contours before allowing improvisation and…

This Moscow-based fabric artist stitches fantastic images on tulle. Rendering her embroidery painting designs on this fine cloth, she makes eye-catching artworks by clever use of color and shading.