Cross Stitch Design Process

As a designer of paintings to cross stitch charts, a good balance between colors and finished cross stitch chart has be achieved. You can go to either extremes to get a very good result. For instance there are cross stitch charts available that go into hundreds of DMC floss usage or have a finished size that is huge. That is very good if you are a computer! But if you are an average cross stitcher, you usually do not have a stash of hundreds of floss to use nor do you want to spend a lifetime finishing your project!

For me, a great cross stitch painting project would be one that uses an average of about 50-60 DMC floss with a finished size that is about 14" in length maximum. This is usually my goal whenever I convert the painting to cross stitch chart. However in some cases, I have to break away from this norm and go towards either a huge chart or using more DMC floss.

One case is this painting by Byam Shaw entitled Rising Spring. Byam Shaw was an Indian born British painter. This particular painting has beautiful colors and a mystical theme. The original painting can be seen here:




















To start with, I tried using 45 colors without dithering. This is a detail of the result. Watch how the body colors change from the number of DMC floss used:

This is Rising Spring at 45 colors:




















This is okay but not great. I then went through adding more colors, 10 or 20 at a time. The colors of the surrounding flowers changed and became more detailed however the body color remained rather flat. That is until I hit 84 colors.. (what??? that many colors??) Yes unfortunately I couldn't get away from using that many colors on this one. As soon as I hit that mark, look at how the body detail changed:

This is Rising Spring at 84 colors:




















Suddenly you see the contours of the body with much more detail! The chart uses low dithering in order to make the stitching process a lot easier. Also the finished sizes for a 14 count aida is just 11" x 14" (not a lifetime to finish!). So sacrifice a little more thread, retain a good finish size and you get a very good result in the end.

This is how the chart looks like now:




















Now that is a very good representation of the actual painting don't you think? Mission accomplished! Chart is now available to download at www.PinoyStitch.org.