Cyncopia – Sabine Schulz

My name is Sabine and come from the North German Plain, or otherwise known as the Northern Lowland (Norddeutsches Tiefland).

Life often has a way of giving you just what you need. Years ago, I was going through a particularly difficult stage in my life. Homebound and dealing with rehabilitation, I was gifted the time to draw again. It had been 20 years since I picked up a pencil, but it all came rushing back. It was therapeutic for me to be creative again after all this time.

At first, I started working with acrylic paints, uploading pictures of my work to my website, which I call Cyncopia. The name was derived from two words; cyan (the color blue), and copy (because I painted from templates).

In the long run, this was not going to work for me. As a wife and mom to two wonderful daughters as well as two lively beagles, I was rather busy and also wasn’t able to get out the house to buy the colors of paint whenever I needed, so I found myself tinkering around on the computer with Adobe Illustrator. This was great! With the stop-start lifestyle, I could save my work as I progressed, which was far more practical than dealing with paint that was not going to wait for me before becoming dry.

My real background was that of a trained clothing engineer, and a few years later found myself venturing with a friend into a sewing machine shop where I noticed them running an embroidery machine. WOW! That was exciting. Throughout all my time in clothing education, I had never experienced anything like this, and then I discovered digitizing.

Destiny came knocking, and I was ready. Armed with a new drawing tablet and my first version of Wilcom’s software, I was able to use their Freehand tool and create the same beautiful artwork for embroidery. It was an incredible learning curve and one which I really enjoyed. Understanding how to work with limited colors, minimizing color changes was key as well as the need to reduce any jumps in designs. It added a new dimension to the word of design.