Sprite Stitch Board!

I want to stitch five of the house shields from Game of Thrones onto a kitchen towel that I bought. I already have the shields picked out and they're laid out in an image that's the size of the towel's stitch area (2 1/2" x 16", 16 count), but I've always had a really hard time reducing the number of colors in an image cleanly. Ideally, the outline of each shield and the four animals would be black, and each individual shield would have five colors or less in it (aside from the black). Whenever I try to do it, I just end up with shapeless blobs of color

By the way, if whoever is able to do this has advice on reducing the number of colors more cleanly/easily, I'd love to hear it. Having a hard time getting the colors right is one of the main reasons I don't stitch more.

I use to try to do the medieval shields years ago. They are really hard to do. The animals are very detailed and you will loose a lot.
Not sure if you can get those to 2 1/2 inches high.

Here is a good site that has lots of beast patterns that you might be able to edit to your liking.
http://www.dragonbear.com/dp/dp14.html

yeah, i keep trying to find bigger versions of them so there's more to work with, but I still can't get the colors down to size. I even found shields I like better (here: http://viewers-guide.hbo.com/game-of-th ... de/houses/), but those are still too small.

the ones in the picture i included are already 2 1/2" tall, i just need to cut down on the number of colors.

Have you considered not cross stitching? Crewel or needlepointing techniques will give you better results for getting details on small scale. All you'd have to do is trace the patterns then stitch it. I'd suggest satin stitch for the backgrounds and then you could use a variety of things for the details. You can still use the colors KG suggests if you don't want to match co ours by hand.

I think what I, personally would do, would be just to eyeball the colours. I mean, if you don't mind them looking "flat", as in not 3D, then you can just do the background colours really easily. Don't worry about shading too much. But, then again, that's just what I would do.