Irises - Van Gogh

I just created a counted cross stitch chart of Van Gogh's Irises and put a copy in my hidden stash. Creating cross stitch patterns is tricky business particularly if you're lazy like me. I don't want to edit the image, perferring to just upload it and let the software iron out the wrinkles. There are several guidelines I use to pick candidates for charting. First is to avoid faces if possible. Sometimes they come out alright. But since the human brain has a special portion of itself set aside just for facial processing, faces don't tend to chart well. The reduction in the number of colors, even with an extended set of blended threads tends to reduce the quality beyond which we will accept. Second is to pick an image with a topic relevant to the target market. Lighthouses, wedding, nature, cats, etc. Impressionist art is my personal favorite. Then pick an appropriate background color if possible. White is the best background color. I'm not afraid of being minimalist and not throwing stitches over every weave on the canvas. Then drive the complexity of the image by determining the stitch count and the use of blended threads. A high thread count makes for alot of threading changes. A limited thread count makes for less detail and realism. A cartoon type of image is ideal for low thread counts. The same with black and white or grayscale images. If you decide to exapnd your pallette with blended threads, the complexity of the chart increases as well. I like to look for images on Google. There are other image search sites as well. The isolated stitch count is important too. If you want to make the chart easier to stitch, raise the count to something higher like 3 to 5. This will make the chart easier to stitch at the cost of reducing the detail of the image. You can achive maximum detail by setting the isolated stitch count to zero. I recommend zero if you edit your image before uploading it to preserve the human touch. Even though I'm too lazy to manually edit the images I use, software cannot replace the benefit of human editing. More on that another time.