Sprite Stitch Board!

Being the uncultured lout I am, I like to use MS paint and my pad of graph paper for sprites. MS Paint has the great feature of never blurring/blending a sprite. My graph paper pad is just pages and pages of hand notations. For any non-sprites, I get my wife to edit the image in photoshop to add a grid and resize it to whatever size I need. How do you do yours?

I use PC Stitch Pro (I even paid for it!) for my patterns. But first I resize the sprite to my desired size, clean up jpg artifacts, and reduce my color palette using Paint.NET. Most of that is by hand, but there is a plugin for paint.net which reduce a color palette to the colors you specify. Once I've got it cleaned up, I import into PC Stitch Pro (with a one-to-one pixel to stitch ratio) and fiddle with the floss colors.

For me, I put a sprite or a picture with a sprite on macromedia fireworks, then save the part I want as a picture. After that, I go into KG-Chart and use the import function which turns the picture into a pattern, and I try to fix it if it's a jpeg or a file like that. I've tried to save the picture from fireworks as a gif, but that dosn't work. That's how I make my pattern.

My sprites come from the Spriters Resource, so they are usually in .PNG format. If not, I change them to .PNG. It's a great format that doesn't get rid of quality so I always use it.

I almost always use paint. I open the file, and crop the sides to one pixel around the edge of the sprite I'm going to work on. Now I extend one side of the file so there's empty space, and using the color picker, create new squares of each color. Next to this I put what the floss numbers are. As I go along, I color over the sprite with the paint brush, usually with the basic teal color, until I'm done.

Sometimes for larger sprites I use Photoshop by overlaying the grid on the image. I also use PC Stitch Pro sometimes, but it's very limited if you don't have the money to spend on it.

When I say larger sprites I'm talking the size of my Super Metroid project. That would get tedious without symbols for me.

For large sprites, I just eyeball them especially if they're very simple sprites that don't have a lot of color.

To make my patterns I've been drawing them with a pencil and graph paper (very old school). My latest project I used paint and printed onto graph paper I printed earlier from a website that has graph designs. I must say, it was only a basic fish design, but for a first time, it came out pretty well. I hope to start using specialised software in the future, but for now patterns from here and pencil and paper are the best I can do.

I snagged a tiny metroid sprite from the Spriters Resource and in photoshop I zoomed in as much as possible, added grid lines then took a screne capture of it. I think I did that one or two more times till I just saved out the zoomed in screne capture as a jpg and used it for reference. Eh, hope that made some sense, probably not the best method around, but it works for me at the moment.

I did something like that in Paint when I was first starting to make my own patterns...

Did you know if you take an image that's 480x600 and blow it up by 1000% (the max it will let you at once) three or four times it will break paint and make it crash upon trying to open it?

I do, unfortunately. Even reinstalling windows didn't work....I ended up reformatting the computer to get paint back, then going out and buying PCStitch.

Amanda wrote:I ended up reformatting the computer to get paint back

im sorry...but, I had to laugh.

johloh wrote:

Amanda wrote:I ended up reformatting the computer to get paint back

im sorry...but, I had to laugh.

I'm a computer tech IRL, so I've never lived that one down...not even after bringing in the completed stitching...