A leopard is born

I get a lot of questions if there is a program that converts a picture into a pattern. To my knowledge there is no satisfying one. I like to draw my patterns on my old Wacom drawing board (15 years and still going strong) in Gimp (free drawing, photo program).

I have a setup of two screens (laptop and main computer) and I use one display for my models in several positions and a screen (attached to my main computer) to 'draw' on. My office is paperless and even my sketches I do freehand on my wacom.

The advantage of going fully digital is I have no paper waste as I often change my mind and throw away more then I keep :)

So I do a first setup, a few lines show me already if I can work with the drawing or not (for copy reasons I have to watermark all my jpg's)

As you see here, this is not a professional drawing yet, and I almost threw this one away, but I liked the eye setup, so I took a bigger brush and started to fill in some quick shadows

This made me more happy. I love to work in this blue (also my logo colour) as it is easy on my eyes, black is so dark and I often work with my layers (in Gimp you can put a drawing over a drawing over a drawing, each drawing called a layer) see through, so I can still see my outline.

Now here comes my little trick: I put a raster (horizontal and vertical lines) over my drawing, each square (windows for interlocking, 3 dc's for mosaic) is 3 dc's.

Then I put my drawing of my Leopard behind it and start to outline the stitches.

You can see that this drawing is far from being a pattern, so I create my upper layer over these and start to draw over the raster, pixel by pixel

For security reasons I had to blur the picture but you get the idea how a drawing for a pattern is made :)

Then I zoom out and in often, and finally when I am happy I have the drawing but not the pattern.

So the drawing is finished ;) and now the big trick starts. I import the full drawing into excel and start working

That will be a next blog :p