Meet Dragon. Dragon is an Irina Vinnik piece that I've been working on for some time. I asked if you'd like to know why some can take days, and others are faster. So here is a small piece on Dragon.

The thing with cross-stitch programs, is it doesn't matter how good they are, they are still limited. Limited in how they can see colour, limited in how they can see detail. Limited even in how you can mass delete a background. We are asking it to turn colour into a DMC pallet so the flaws are expected. A single photo averages tens to hundreds of thousands of colours. If you consider that DMC has less than 600 shades... it's expected for the program to have to work miracles. You also need to consider the size, you're asking an average image to be compressed into something you can realistically stitch in a lifetime.

So... the process begins with an initial 'fast import' I like to call it. During this fast import, I have expectations on where I'll need to manually work on the art and where it should see pretty OK. I know where it's going to see false colours and where it should see true colours. I actually have lots of pre-saved pallets so I can work with my expected results. So the quick import shows me all the flaws. 

Once I have the flaws, I work back and forth refining, highlighting, doing all the things to this art piece. Being a dragon, there are lots of scales and fine detail. So it took a long time compared to other works. 

Once I get the detail etc correct, it's onto that background removal. Some pieces benefit from a 'feathering' of pale or alternative whites around them, and some are better off with a hard to the line of the features approach. Dragon needed that hard line, so I have been manually going around and removing the background pixel by pixel around my dragon features to give crisp lines and effect where required. There is some art, where the blur between the features and the background are far too similar and to try and cut that away gives a very blocky ugly result, and for these reasons I'll never do a BR on that unless the artist is able to provide one so that I have their vision of the features not my best guess. This is why I say, not every piece is cut out to be a BR.

It isn't over once the cut out is done, I then go through all the colours in the design and decide which can go and which to keep. 

Once that is done, the final touches are made. Assigning symbols, organising the colours, the names of the colours, how the mockup will present and then technical aspects of the expected PDF print. A lot of these are pre-saved so it's more a case of applying those changes and waiting for them to take effect.

Now onto adjusting that mockup to add in the copyright details and watermark which is done away from the program. Within the program I print to PDF all the counts and styles available and that can sometimes take a very long time if the desing is large. It demands as much of my PC as some games as it works hard to translate a heap of colours symbols etc into a PDF file. 

We now have all our files, so I'll grab all the data from those designs and pop that in the product listing so you know what the design entails, pop all the files into a zipfolder, and complete the listing and launch it. Then it's onto socials to make sure everyone knows there is a fresh drop! 

Do I simply 'shrink' the design to become a miniature or expand it to be a XL or Max? Nope. It's a whole re-start. The only thing that stays the same is I've done some of the initial groundwork and if I do it close enough to the original, I'll remember all the details I need whilst working on it. Minis are some of the hardest to make!

There are of course, folks out there that have what is known in the industry as a 'pattern mill'. This is a term used for patterns that are pushed through a program and presented as they are within the constraints they set for their program. This is the UXS difference is the time love and care each design receives. So we don't push as many designs as others but this is because of the time given to each design. 

But you've been releasing lots lately! I hear you cry. And this is true! I have so many designs that I am part way through, because each artist gets time spent so I'll get as far as I can get with the time I have. With all the udpates, I ended up with so many partially worked on designs but I also decided to revive some older designs that had been retired a long time that were found after the fire. These ones are easy as they are just more updating than anything. So you'll see for some time a massive push until I get bogged down with 'this piece speaks to me I have to chart it now'. 

Hope you enjoyed my post! I'm off to get Dragon out before Mothers Day!