But also it’s fun to get game sprites or existing images and stitch them as well. The Design ItselfIdeally, you are turning your own unique artwork to turn into a pattern. Please do experiment and find the process that works for you! But as I get tons of questions on my process, I figured it was time to write it down. Additionally, this is only my process and it is not the only way to do things. But WinStitch/MacStitchand STOIKare also great programs with similar functions, so don’t be afraid to try those out as well!I’m not going to be super thorough on each of these features, I’m just going over the general steps to consider when creating a design. There is no viewer software supporting the Mac or phone/tablet operating.I’m only really familiar with PCStitch, so that’s what I’ll be explaining.Because I do love fictional botany. Based on a plant from a video game. It’s simply polite, and usually they’re more than excited that you even want to.For this tutorial, I’m making my own art.Let’s use the inventory icon instead.There we go. I don’t remember picking blobby purple masses in game. Well that’s… kind of boring. So I googled up some reference images of the Kingsblood plant from World of Warcraft:Oh.
![]() ![]() Pcstitch Mac Or PhonePcstitch Free Ones LikeLook up tutorials online for doing pixel art in your program of choice, and go to town.I kept to a 28×28 pixel work area so I could fit it into a pendantlater. (Fun fact, Paint.net is what ConcernedApe of StardewValley fame recommended to me and what he did all the art for the game in.)If you already have Photoshop, or some other editing program, that’s good too. There’s also free ones like Paint.net. Programs like Pyxel Edit or Asepriteare what I use most often. Let’s draw that.Now, I recommend using an editing program specifically designed for pixel art, as they have some awesome features just for making tiny art. Though it’s not as time saving as you would think, honestly. We haven’t even gotten to PCStitch and I’ve already spent an hour or two on this thing.You can also draw directly into PCStitch, Winstitch, etc. I used the muted colors from the ‘in game’ image, while keeping the general shape of the icon.This isn’t an art tutorial, so I won’t show you “ The rest of the f*ng owl“, but I am showing you my general process to get an idea of what all goes into pattern design. R undelete for windowsLuckily, most programs expect you to want to do this, so there’s a handy Import button:Pick out your file, click the ‘show preview’ button and… oh. Importing into PCStitchOnce you have your art, we’re gonna get it into our cross stitch program. Plus, pixel art programs can’t account for backstitch, so if you’re doing backstitch heavy designs, it may be best to just draw straight into a cross stitch program. For now, simply make sure you’ve also selected your brand of thread from the Floss tab (in this case, DMC Stranded Cotton).50 colors is more than enough for this little guy, but if you’re importing a full color photo or artwork, you may want to turn that up even if you’re not planning to keep all 500 colors we’ll work on reducing colors later. And are thoroughly regretting choosing anything with purple in it. So for pixel art you’ll want to use the same size as the original design.For photos, you just want to make it whatever size you’re willing to stitch it as.Well, now you’ve got your image at the right size. In this case, stretching a 28×28 pixel art up to 100×100 makes it look… well, awful. Whether you’re importing a photo or a small sprite, you want to define how big the end pattern is going to be. You’ll probably want to bring out your box of floss and look at some of these colors in person too, as cross stitch programs are notorious for not displaying some colors quite right. As you’ve seen, some colors look fine (The lighter greens), and others look awful. Just right-click and delete.After that, one of the most time consuming parts of making designs is picking out floss colors. This is not great if your sprite already has black in it, so keep that in mind and make the background of your image a unique color so it’s easy to remove. Since my image was transparent, PCStitch automatically filled it all with black. For this, I right click on any color, go to Palette tools, then Floss Usage. Click the Replace button to replace all stitches of that color.The next thing I usually do is reduce colors. Click the color you like in the ‘Available colors’ menu. Click the color you want to change down in the floss palette. I also like to go through each and every color while in this highlight mode and see if there’s any stray stitches off by themselves. So right click the color and select ‘Highlight Entry’This makes it real easy to see where those stitches are so you can replace them with nearby colors as needed. Other times, I already have a very similar color next to it and can combine the two.For larger designs sometimes I often have trouble finding where those two stray stitches are. Sometimes it is, like two stitches for tiny eyes. Usually, anything less than 15 I’m going to investigate and see if it’s necessary. However, when importing game sprites I often see colors that only have 1 or two stitches. If I have a design with a ton of colors and it’s harder to pick unique symbols, at least make sure any that are too similar to each other are at least not even remotely a similar color or in the same area of a pattern. You can change how your pattern is displayed right up in the menu.I like to keep to simple symbols and make sure they’re not too similar to each other. So you want to go through and make sure your pattern is legible. Cleaning up SymbolsOne of my least favorite things about buying patterns online is discovering that some of the symbols are far too similar to each other. Or maybe the symbols were more similar than they looked in the program. Whether you do it, or end up getting someone else to test it, I encourage you to actually stitch it if you’re planning to sell your pattern.You’ll find that along the way a color doesn’t look quite the same in person, or looks different when placed next to another color. Exporting the PatternWe’re almost there! Time to export the design.I like to include both a full color “Blocks & Symbols” version as well as a Black&White “Symbols” version.You might also choose to have a ‘Virtual Sitches’ version without the gridlines to show more or less what your design will look like once stitched.Arguably one of the most important parts of designing is actually stitching your patterns. Always feel free to call me out on it if symbols in my patterns are hard to distinguish. The finished designI usually import my chart and legend into a pdf file, but when it’s something just for me I like to just screenshot the ‘floss usage’ window (after putting them in numerical order) and tack it on to the side of the chart in a photo editing program. Usually my tent stitching has much better coverage (IMO), but I still think it turned out pretty good!Total time from finding image references to finishing stitching was about ~4-5 hours. I also cleaned up a few stray stitches that didn’t quite seem to belong once they were stitched.This was tent stitched over 1 on 28 count fabric, and on fabric I ended up not liking because the holes weren’t well defined and it was harder to keep stitches even. When it’s been stitched and approved by a real life human.When I test stitched this one I ended up changing out two of the greens entirely, and made the border around it a dark grey rather than the 939 I had originally chosen. If you have additional questions about using PCStitch, feel free to ask her directly or ask in the Pixel Stitch Discord.
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