Findy · illustration · 7 September 2026 · every picture the screens ask for

You chose felt. Here it is doing the hard things.

You picked felt and stitch from 14 styles, and you picked it from one picture of an easy scene. These four are the things the real screens will actually ask of it, so you can see it fail or pass before two dozen drawings get made in it. The 14 you were choosing from are still further down this page.

The four tests

Each one is a real screen's job, not a pretty picture. Two are on a plain cream background and two have the whole scene built out of felt, because the one worry I put on the sheet before you chose was that people, boxes and rooms all being one material might make every screen look like the same screen.

Can felt point?
The welcome screen: raise the camera, take the photo, come and look. Plain ground.
Gesture reads instantlyThe figure is the whole subjectFlash came as a sparkle, not its own piece

Can a stitched face look puzzled?
The nothing-found screen: perplexed, faintly amused. Whole scene in felt.
The expression is unmistakableHe barely separates from the room behind himBusy, and almost all one brown

Can somebody standing still say something?
The account screen: almost no movement, and it still has to mean something. Plain ground.
The hardest brief of the four, and it passedCalm and reassuring without doing anythingReads as a real woman in her fifties

Can it do people other than that family?
A teenager and his grandfather in a shed. Whole scene in felt.
Both ages read clearlyWarm and completely believableAgain the figures sit inside a texture soup

What the four of them settle

Felt can do the two things I was least sure about. It points and waves clearly, and a stitched face really can look puzzled. Those were the two that could have killed it and neither did.

It does ages and builds well. A teenager, a man in his seventies and a woman in her fifties all read as exactly what they are, which matters because you want the person chosen to suit each screen rather than one cast repeated.

And the worry was real, but it has a cheap answer: put the person on a plain background. Compare the first and third pictures with the second and fourth. On plain cream the figure is instantly the thing you look at. Inside a full felt room the person competes with the scenery and it all goes slightly brown. That matters more than looks: a drawing on an empty screen is there to carry your eye to the one thing worth tapping, and a busy room does the opposite of that.

One small thing for later. In the first picture the camera flash came back as a sparkle painted onto the phone rather than as its own separate piece. For that screen the flash has to be able to fire on its own, so it needs drawing separately when the real artwork is made. Nothing to decide now.

The 14 you were choosing from

Kept here rather than thrown away, so you can go back and change your mind against the real pictures. The short notes under each one were written before any of them existed, from what each technique usually does. Six turned out wrong, and four of those flattered a style I had recommended to you, so they have been rewritten to describe the picture actually above them and they say where I got it wrong.