of things,” says Banghart. “I love
the turning of relatively raw
materials into finished products.”
In 1995 Banghart met his wife, Zara,
who had lived previously in Marin,
and in 2003, they decided to retire
and move to Novato, where they
currently reside. Having been “an
early morning coffee shop denizen
forever,” on his first day in Novato,
he discovered Peet’s. One day,
while chatting with a coffee shop
friend, comparing their art and craft
projects, he mentioned the early
picture of his son. An idea suddenly
occurred to him.
“I realized that I could use advances
in digital photography, image
manipulation software and my
own programming skill to create
full color patterns for cross stitch,”
says Banghart. He added that
although others had created cross
stitch patterns from photographs,
they were limited to only around a
dozen colors.
Banghart explained that there are
454 different colors of embroidery
floss, and that colors on a computer
Rick Banghart incorporated hundreds of colors to create
the subtleties and shading in this large portrait of his son’s
family.
are represented in the amount of
RGB (red, green and blue) in each
one. Using a color analysis tool on
his computer, he created a machine-
understandable list of RGB colors
that matched all the embroidery
floss colors.
Banghart finds photos that he likes,
manipulates them in Photoshop,
and creates a pattern on the
computer, which can be hundreds
of pages long. The pattern maps
out the exact location of every
stitch, sorted by individual colors,
because he stitches only one color
at a time. An average 18-inch
square piece requires roughly 32,400
stitches—and takes many months to
complete.
When he’s not stitching, Banghart
is busy with lots of other projects,
including designing sound for a
few theater companies in Marin,
and freelancing as a developer and
programmer. Always on the lookout
for new things to experiment
with, he is currently working on a
program that will enable him to
create cross stitched pieces in 3D.
Banghart admits that you have
to be very patient to do this kind
of work. “I do this as a kind of
meditation in many ways, says
Banghart. “When I’m stitching,
there’s a sort of magic that
happens—it’s almost as if a rapport
develops between me and the
subject.”
Rick Banghart displays a computer-generated image that represents a 3D picture,
which will be his next project.
34 MARIN ARTS & CULTURE
“I love the process of doing them,”
he adds. “There’s love in every
stitch.” MA&C