[Illustration: 75. SHADING IN CHAIN-STITCH.]
The more natural way of shading is to let the stitches follow the lines of the drawing, and so make use of them to express form, as with the strokes of the pen or pencil upon paper. Thus, in mediæval figurework prior to the 15th century, the faces were usually done in split stitch, worked concentrically from the middle of the cheek outward, and so suggesting the roundness of the face (Illustration 87). But just as there is a system of shading according to which the draughtsman makes all his strokes in one direction (slanting usually), so the embroidress may, if she prefer, take her stitches all one way; and in the 15th and 16th centuries the fashion was to work flesh in short-satin stitches always in the vertical direction (Illustration 79). The term "long-and-short-stitch" is frequently used by way of describing the stitch. It does not, as I have said, help us much. The stitches are in the first place only satin-stitches worked not in even rows, as in Illustration 40, but so that there is no line of demarcation between one row and another. And this, in the case of gradated colour, makes the shading softer. The words long-and-short apply strictly only to the outer row of stitches. You begin, that is to say, with alternately long and short stitches. If you work after that with stitches of equal length, they necessarily alternate or dovetail. If the form to be worked necessitates radiation in the stitching, there results a texture something like the feathering of a bird's breast (Illustration 85), whence the name plumage-stitch, another term describing not so much a stitch as the use of a stitch.
No matter what the stitch, one must be able to draw in order to express form: it is rather more difficult to draw with a needle than with a pen, that is all. True, the designer may do that for you, and make such a workmanlike drawing that there is no mistaking it; but it takes a skilled draughtsman to do it.
[Illustration: 76. SHADING IN SHORT STITCHES.]
In flattish decorative work, where the drawing is in firm lines, as in Illustration 87, the task of the embroidress is relatively easy--there is not much shading, for example, in the drapery of King Abias, and the vine leaves are merely worked with yellower green towards the edges. Even where there is strong shading, a draughtsman who knows his business may make shading easy by drawing his shadows with firm outlines. The taste of the artist who designed the roses in Illustration 75 is too pictorial to win the heart of any one with a leaning towards severity of design; too much relief is sought; but the way he has got it shows the master workman; he has deliberately laid in _flat_ washes of colour, each with its precise outline, which the worker had only to follow faithfully with flat tambour work. A design like that, given the working drawing, asks little of the worker beyond patient care: of the designer it asks considerable knowledge.