Now let’s see if there’s any colors we don’t need. Find the color down in your floss palette. The first thing you probably want to do is remove the background. Once you’ve confirmed your preferred thread brand is selected, go ahead and click okay and we’ll get into the main program area. So if you ever start adding Kreinik or other brands, keep that in mind. Speaking of colors, it defaults to the last thread palette you used. If you chose something with a lot of purple, I’m sorry. You’ll also get an idea of how it handles colors. You’ll want to change the size to match the original image, as shown in the upper left. Unfortunately, PCStitch is not great at resizing pixel art, as you can see. By default, the size of the pattern will be larger than your pixel art. With pixel art especially, you want to make sure PCStitch is converting your image exactly. Click the “Show Preview” box on the right and OH GOSH WHAT IS THAT?! IT LOOKS AWFUL! You’ll then get a screen showing the image you imported and a blank preview. Now that you have your art, head over to the Import/Export tab and click Import.Ĭlick browse and find your image. This tutorial is already gonna be long, so I won’t get into that now. There are plenty of free editing programs out there such as GIMP if needed. PCStitch treats transparent backgrounds as black, and that can merge with the outline of your design so be careful. If it has a transparent background, you’ll want to fill in the background with a color that is not in the image. Regardless, you’ll want to crop the image to the part you want to pattern. Please also don’t steal random pixel art off the internet without the artist’s permission either. Important: I wouldn’t recommend selling patterns of just straight game sprites unless you have permission from the developer, but it can be great for personal use patterns. This is a great site if you’re wanting video game sprites to work with. I pulled it from Spriters-resource, as part of a sheet. This Prism Flower is from the game Shining Force 2. This is why I create my designs in pixel art programs first.įor today’s example though, I’ll be using a game sprite. If you try importing a photo or drawn image, there’s going to be a lot more cleanup to do. The methods I’ll be describing today work best with pixel art. But it IS what I’m most familiar with, so that’s what I’ll be going over today. I am definitely in no way sponsored by PCStitch. It’s all a matter of personal preference. They all have basically the same features, and their own upsides and downsides. I would recommend you try out several of them and see which UI makes most sense to you. Most of them, including PCStitch, have free trials you can use to play around with them. Before we get started I want to make it clear PCStitch is by no means the only cross stitch program out there.

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