A chart from a portrait: what to choose so the face comes out right
People often want to stitch a portrait from a photo — a person or a pet. And a portrait is where mistakes show most: on a face the eye spots anything that's off. Here's what to look at when you make a chart from a portrait.
A face needs room
Eyes, lips and nose are small details. If the chart is small, the face gets only a few squares and the features get lost. So before choosing the size, crop the photo so the face fills most of the frame, and pick a size with room to spare: the more squares the face gets, the better it comes out.
As a guide: in the photo-based pieces we found on forums (there aren't many), the long side is about 140 stitches. Size also means hours — see "How long does a cross stitch take?" for the time, and "How to work out the size and the thread" for turning squares into centimetres or inches.
An off shade on the face
A common complaint about charts from photos is "the colour's wrong": a patch of an odd shade on a cheek or forehead. So before buying thread, look at which threads ended up on the skin.
- Not many threads on skin. In charts that stitchers make by hand, skin usually takes 3–6 threads, not a dozen.
- Warm tones. Skin threads in those charts are warm, from peach to pinkish. Pink and lilac tones on skin do occur and look fine.
- No grey or green. No grey or green threads turned up in hand-made skin. If they've landed on a cheek, check whether it's a colour-matching mistake.
Single stitches
Another common complaint is too many colours and single stitches — "confetti". On skin they make a face look speckled, and they're slow to stitch. It's better to deal with them in the chart: by cleaning up single stitches or by merging two nearly identical shades into one. For stitching areas where confetti is left anyway, see "Confetti in cross stitch".
Look after the eyes
If the highlight in an eye is a single light stitch, cleaning up single stitches can remove it and the eyes look empty. So protect the eyes when cleaning up — with the details brush.
Where the app fits
Crossette's Chart from a photo has a Portrait preset (Pet for animals). You can crop the photo right on the screen. If the size is too small for a face, the app tells you: "Too small for faces — try …".
What you can fix in the chart:
- An off shade. In the thread list you can Exclude it or Merge with… a nearby shade.
- Single stitches. The cleanup brush removes them where you paint, and "Show what cleanup changed" marks the squares it changed.
- Eyes. The details brush marks areas where small details should be kept.
- Background can be removed with the background brush.
Before / after shows the photo and the chart side by side. Threads are DMC, and it's all worked out right on the phone. For general photo tips, see "Chart from a photo".
About the author
This article was written by the Crossette team. We're building Crossette, a cross stitch tracker for iPhone and iPad. It's in development; to join the beta, see the Beta page.