Using pixel art as a pattern for any grid craft

One pixel, one stitch

Pixel art and grid crafts are built the same way. A picture is made from a grid of small units, each one a single flat color. That means any piece of pixel art is a ready-made pattern: one pixel becomes one cross stitch, one fuse bead, one diamond painting drill, one crochet or knit stitch, or one C2C tile.

A 32 by 32 sprite is 1,024 stitches or beads, whichever craft you choose. What changes is how big it comes out, and what shape.

Cross stitch and beads keep the art square. Crochet and knitting stretch it sideways.

Square cells and wide cells

Some crafts give every pixel a square cell:

• Cross stitch on Aida or evenweave. The fabric has the same number of threads, or Aida blocks, per inch both ways, so each stitch is as wide as it is tall.
• Fuse beads, which sit on pegs laid out in a square grid. The large square pegboard for 5 mm beads is 29 pegs by 29, and Perler's measures 5.7 inches across, so each bead takes up about 5 mm.
• Diamond painting, where drills sit on a square grid. Square drills fit edge to edge, and round ones leave small gaps but follow the same grid.
• C2C crochet, whose tiles come out close to square. See how to read a C2C graph for how one tile maps to one square.

Stockinette and single crochet are different. Their stitches are usually wider than they are tall. A typical worsted weight yarn label gives a knitting gauge of 16 stitches and 22 rows to 4 inches, so each stitch is about 1.4 times as wide as it is tall. The same label's crochet gauge, 12 single crochet and 15 rows, makes each stitch 1.25 times as wide as tall.

What that does to a circle

Take a circle 20 pixels across. In cross stitch or beads, it stays a circle. Knit at 16 stitches and 22 rows, it's 5 inches wide and only about 3.6 inches tall. In single crochet at 12 and 15, it's about 6.7 inches wide and 5.3 tall. Round faces turn wide, and a perfectly circular coin turns into a squat oval.

You have a few ways out:

• Pick a craft with square cells for that design.
• Redraw the art on a taller grid. Multiply the number of rows by how much wider than tall your stitches are. The 20-pixel circle needs 25 rows of single crochet, or 27 to 28 rows of knitting. Add the extra rows by hand, where they change the shape least, rather than stretching the image in software.
• Chart on paper shaped like your stitches. The free knitting graph paper tool draws cells to your gauge, for knitting or crochet.

Whichever you choose, swatch first. The 1.4 and 1.25 figures are typical, but measure your own gauge.

Limiting the palette

Pixel art from older games is disciplined about color, and that's a big part of why it makes friendly patterns. The NES built its characters from small hardware sprites, 8 by 8 or 8 by 16 pixels, and each sprite could show three colors plus transparent, chosen from a master palette of 64 entries (fewer distinct colors, since some repeat). A character usually took several sprites.

Modern pixel art often uses far more. Artists shade with ramps of related colors and add anti-aliasing, in-between colors placed along edges to soften the stair steps. On screen you barely notice them. In a craft, each one is one more floss, bead, drill or yarn color to buy, and in knit or crochet colorwork one more strand to manage.

Before you start, trim:

• Merge shades that are close enough to read as one from a few feet away.
• Fold anti-aliasing pixels into whichever neighbor they're closest to.
• Keep outlines in one dark color.
• Count how many pixels use each color. A color used for only a few pixels deserves a second look. Merge it unless it's doing a job, like an eye or a highlight.

Watch for dithering too, where two colors alternate in a checkerboard to fake a third. It looks fine from across the room, but in stitches it means scattered single stitches in cross stitch, which are slow, and a color change on nearly every stitch in crochet colorwork. Replace it with a solid color unless the texture is the point.

Transparent pixels need a decision as well. In cross stitch you can leave them unstitched and let the fabric show. In fuse beads you can leave the pegs empty, and the finished piece takes the outline of the sprite. In knitting and crochet there's no empty option, so the background becomes one more yarn color.

Fewer colors also make the chart easier to follow, because each symbol covers more ground. How many colors a cross stitch pattern needs goes into choosing a count.

Scaling only works in whole numbers

Pixel art stays crisp only when every source pixel becomes a whole number of cells. At 2 times, each pixel becomes a 2 by 2 block and nothing changes but the size.

At 1.5 times, things go wrong in one of two ways. With nearest-neighbor scaling, which copies pixels without mixing them, some pixels come out 2 cells wide and their neighbors only 1, so lines that were even go lumpy. With a smoothing resize, like the bilinear scaling browsers use for photos, the software invents in-between colors along every edge. That soft fringe is the blur. Run a blurred sprite through a pattern converter and every soft edge turns into extra colors and stray single stitches you'll have to clean up.

In a craft you rarely need to scale at all. Work the art one pixel to one cell, and change the finished size with your materials, or by a whole number:

• On 14-count Aida, 32 pixels is about 2.3 inches. On 11-count, about 2.9.
• For something bigger, stitch each pixel as a 2 by 2 block. That's 64 stitches across, about 4.6 inches on 14-count.
• In fuse beads, the same 32 by 32 sprite needs more than one 29 by 29 pegboard, so plan to link four boards.

If you're starting from a photo instead of pixel art, a converter does the shrinking and color reduction for you. The photo to Perler beads converter runs in your browser with no account and counts the beads for each color. For a sprite that already exists, redrawing it square by square at its own size is usually quicker than cleaning up any resize.

Drawing your own

Craft Studio's pixel art editor (free, with an account) uses square cells, starts at 32 by 32 and goes up to 1000 by 1000, and exports PNG and SVG. That's the right home for art you'll use in several crafts. If you already know the craft, start in that craft's editor so the cells have its shape from the beginning.

Design at the final size. A 16 by 16 grid holds a recognizable character and very little else, which keeps the design simple.

Other people's sprites

Characters and sprites from commercial games are protected by copyright. Under US law, only the copyright owner can make or authorize an adaptation of a work, and the Copyright Office lists art reproductions among derivative works. An unauthorized adaptation may be infringement.

Fair use is decided case by case, and one of the factors is whether the use is commercial. Selling patterns or finished pieces of someone else's characters is commercial. Characters you created yourself, or art released under a license that allows what you're doing, avoid the question. This is general information, not legal advice, so ask a lawyer before you sell anything built on someone else's characters.