Pixel Stitching – Magazine Alert

Originally posted 2008-05-20 03:20:14. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

I don’t know if you read Craft magazine, but you should. It’s a quarterly magazine about making stuff which is fresh, fun, and endlessly creative.

I always find exciting, interesting, and inspiring projects, artists, and ideas in it.

I want recommend the current issue to you especially. You’ll know it, it’s one the newsstands now and has a pair of Converse high tops with knitted tops on them on the cover.

I often get questions about how to convert a picture into needlepoint and often wonder how to do this so it looks good and look like needlepoint, not a needlepoint of a picture.

The current issue of Craft has a step-by-step tutorial on how to do this using Photoshop. The example takes a photo of a pigeon in flight, shows you pictures throughout the process and has a photo of the resulting whole stitch counted cross stitch piece.

Since it’s whole stitch, there is no reason why it couldn’t be needlepoint.

There are a couple of points I’d like to bring up about the process, one in the magazine, one not.

First off, the magazine urges you to pick a picture with the right amount of clarity and detail. The more small fussy details the source photo has, the more the end result will be fussy and cease to look like needlepoint and more like a bad imitation of a photo. I think this is the main reason why needlepoint conversions of people’s faces always look bad to me. A face has lots of detail and lots of color changes. So you always have a scaling problem when you convert them to needlepoint (I discussed this type of problem in an earlier post).

Second, and the article doesn’t cover this, pixel stitching only works when you can step back far enough to have the pixels blend with your eye. This is why pixels work in printing artwork in the first place. If you’ve ever wondered about it, look at a newspaper photo close up, you can see the dots. Step back and you see the pictures. Applying this to needlepoint. I think pixel shading only works when the mesh size of the canvas is fairly small. I pretty much would only do this on 14 or 18 mesh.

But I loved the process and one of these days I’m going to try it for myself.

Related posts:

1. Magazine Alert — Needlepoint Maps
2. Magazine Alert & Needlepoint Gift Ideas
3. Bargello – Magazine Alert
4. Stephen Beale – Magazine alert
5. A Needle Pulling Thread – Magazine Review

Tags: converting photos to needlepoint, craft magazine, needlepoint of photos, photoshop, pixel shading