My friend Mike requested that I make his afghan using the Great Wave off of Kanagawa by Hokusai.
I liked the colors in this version better. I found this ages ago before I knew I would be blogging so I don't have a link for you. I know, bad girl :-(
Having made the mistake of attempting a tapestry afghan without a pattern before I decided to spend the extra time to make a nice and neat gridded pattern beforehand.
However, the computer trick I used to create the grid was muddy when I used it on the original painting or the night version so I made a simplified sketch of the painting outlining the color sections.
I then scanned the image onto my computer and filled in the sections with a very limited selection of colors.
I made the scan of my image a semi-transparent layer and traced my lines in another layer, finally deleting my original image. I highly recommend making your lines the same color as the fill color (I had to go back and remove all of my black lines).
To make my pretty image into a nice grid I used the pixelate feature on paint.net, which is a free image editing application available online.
I believe pixelate is a common feature among image editors, though, so you should be able to find it with whatever program you use.
I set my cell size to 10 pixels, but you play around with number until the image looks good without having too many cells.
I added another layer for my grid lines. I painstakingly made a grid that would work with 10 pixel cells, if you'd like it email me and I'll send it to you.
Here is a detail of the final result. Unfortunately, the pixelation process blurred some of the colors, meaning that I have to decide whether that light blue square should be white or blue.
4 comments:
There are some free cross stitch programs that will turn photos into graphs. I believe you could crochet off those just as easily.
I actually did try that route first, but wasn't happy with the results. A) I couldn't find a free program that would let me print out the finished design, and B) the color reduction feature chose odd colors to keep.
However cross-stitch programs are great because you'll never get blurred edges. Admittedly I never tried my picture with a cross stitch program (which would solve the color reduction problem).
Thanks for the heads-up Debra. I might look into that option again for my next tapestry crochet project :-)
This is an impressively technical article, Esther! I like the screenshots. There's also a way to reduce the total number of colors in the image to a particular quantity -- perhaps this would have helped with the pixelating muddiness?
I think it is a very clear and helpful article, too.
Nice work!
Now we need to see the afghan in progress.....
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