Cross Stitch Pet Portrait: Where the Colours Go

The dog, and what the whole thing costs

Everything here comes from one photograph: a golden retriever on a porch, head and shoulders filling the frame, shot in late afternoon. It is the same picture used in the general article on turning a photo into a chart, so the numbers on the two pages agree with each other.

At 140 by 112 on 14 count aida the finished piece is 10 by 8 inches. With a twelve colour limit that is 15,584 stitches, 19 skeins and 27.7 hours. What follows is where inside that job the work actually sits, because it is not spread evenly and nobody says so.

The eyes are two percent of the chart and seven of the twelve threads

I drew rectangles on the chart and counted which DMC numbers appear inside each one. The rectangles are on the picture, so you can see what was measured rather than take my word for the boundary.

Two things fall out of that table. No thread here exists only for the background: all twelve numbers turn up somewhere on the head, so the grass and the decking are made from threads the dog already needed. I did not expect that.

And the eyes are 336 squares, about a fiftieth of the piece, pulling more than half the palette. If an animal portrait ever looks wrong while the rest of it looks fine, that is why: the squares carrying the likeness are the fewest and the fussiest.

What a bigger palette actually buys

The usual advice is to allow more colours for a portrait. Here is the same photo at five limits, counting how many numbers reach each area.

Going from twelve to twenty four doubles the shopping list and buys eight extra numbers on a nose the size of a stamp. Whether that is worth it depends on how close people will stand. It also costs in a way the table hides: more numbers means more places where two neighbouring squares disagree, and those isolated single stitches are the ones you will resent. On this photo twelve colours left 25 of them and twenty nine left 124.

Below nine, something else breaks. The eyes drop to five threads and a golden retriever’s brown eye, which is dark ring, iris and a highlight, has to be told in three tones. It reads as a hole.

The count on its own is not the number to watch. Thirty threads on this photo give 66 distinguishable tones once density shading is counted, well short of the 151 that thirty threads could reach, because many of the shades picked are the same thing at arm’s length.

How big before an eye is an eye

A stitch holds nothing smaller than itself, so an eye needs squares to be more than a blob. Here is one eye, on the same crop, at five chart widths.

The right hand column ends the argument. Going past 140 does not improve the eye on this photo, because the photograph runs out first: at 200 across there are 5.1 pixels behind each square, under the seven you want, and the extra squares average blur. Bigger charts need bigger photographs, not more patience. If you are working from an old picture of an animal that has died, check this before anything else. It is the constraint you cannot fix later.

Taking the picture, if you still can

• Get down to their head height. From standing you get a skull and a snout, and the eyes go small and dark.
• Fill the frame with head and shoulders. Cropping in afterwards throws away the pixels you just measured.
• Daylight, not direct sun. Sun puts a blown white patch on the muzzle that has no thread to match it.
• Never portrait mode. Its synthetic blur is a smooth gradient, and smooth gradients are what produce scattered single stitches.
• Dark animals need light behind them. A black cat lit from the front is a silhouette with no local contrast for the chart to find.

Cutting the background out

The single largest saving in a pet portrait is the thing that is not the pet.

Masking everything outside the head left 6,912 stitches instead of 15,584, 15 skeins instead of 19, and 11.9 hours instead of 27.7. Less than half the work for a piece that says the same thing. The mask is a plain ellipse, cruder than cutting round the ears properly, so a careful cutout would save a little more.

Bare cream aida reads as air rather than as a hole, which is the oldest trick in portrait needlework and costs nothing. What you give up is context.

Fur, whiskers and the parts a grid refuses

Fur works better than people fear, because it has strong local contrast and the chart has something to bite on. Two habits help.

Keep every top diagonal leaning the same way. A portrait is mostly one mid tone in slightly different shades, and if half the crosses lean the other way the surface catches light unevenly and you see it across the room.

Leave the whiskers until the end and put them in as backstitch over the finished crosses. A whisker is thinner than a stitch, so it cannot be a square. The same goes for the fine hairs on an ear edge and the highlight in an eyelid.

Most of the hours in a 15,584 stitch piece are flat and mindless, and most of the difficulty is inside those 336 squares of eye. Do the eyes when you are fresh, and be honest about the total before you cut a 13 by 11 inch piece of aida. Every number here came out of the model Flossgrid runs on, from one photo of one dog.