Diamond Painting / Pixel Hobby
What is Diamond Painting?
Diamond painting is a relatively new technique for creating beautiful finished work, based upon using plastic beads or crystals instead of stitched crosses. However the technique owes a great deal to counted cross stitch, to the extent that even the color ranges of the available beads resemble those of standard DMC silk shades. In cross stitch charts, you (usually) work from a symbolic chart, and stitch a cross of a suitable color onto an even weave fabric. You draw in color, perhaps print in symbols-on-color, and finally stitch cross by cross onto fabric.
Diamond Painting (and close cousin ‘PixelHobby’) are faster to work, as they only require you to pick a diamond (or pixel) of the right color, and place it in the correct spot on an adhesive surface.The surface you apply to , varies by supplier. Some suppliers print the chart in color onto self-adhesive plastic backing. Some print onto adhesive cloth. And some provide printed charts identical to cross stitch charts, leaving you to apply the diamonds to a substrate of your own choosing.
Creating your own
Size: Because the diamonds/beads/pixels are plastic, the size is fixed. They are designed to match the size of counted cross stitch or tapestry worked at 1/10inch. So when you start a new chart, select 1/10inch as the stitched-per-inch size - this will tell you onscreen how large your finished work will be.
It is important to realise that the size ONSCREEN bears no relation to the size of the symbols you print.
(Cross stitch charts are often printed bigger than the finished stitching, because that makes the symbols easier to read)
A sheet of A4 paper can hold around 70 x 90 squares of 1/10 inch. A chart which is bigger than that either needs to use several sheets of paper, or be printed on larger stock such as A3 Assuming you want to work with a single sheet of A4 paper, start a new chart which is 70 x 90 or smaller. You can draw a design by hand, or you can import a picture. Whichever method you use, work with DMC Silks colors (For PixelHobby work, there is a set of colors called ‘PixelHobby’ instead)
Import or design your image. And you can view that on screen to see how it might look when completed.
PRINTING
If you want to create a printed chart and glue the crystals to a separate sheet of fabric or plastic, then you could simply print ‘as if it was a cross stitch chart’ and work from that visually, symbol by symbol, but you need to ensure the size is correct.So on the Print screen, you need to set the square size to be 1/10 (0.100) of an inch or a little bigger. When the size is close to 1/10 inch, the print dialog will show @ 1/10in like this:
NEW in 2021
Over time, although we say 'make the size 1/10inch', we have learned that this is difficult to follow for some people.So in the 2021 Premium edition onwards, we have added new menu items that create images or PDF files set to the right size without asking.
The output can be round or square symbols on color background, and are exactly 1/10 inch in size.
For more options, you can use the PDF version , (which offers 2.8mm , 1/20inch, 1/12inch and 1/6inch output in addition to the more common 1/10inch)
If you want to create a piece of paper / plastic / or cloth that is ready to have diamonds glued to it, then after you have printed the design to stiff paper, you can spray the paper with adhesive and apply diamonds to it. Or you can apply adhesive to the back of each diamond in turn and apply to the printout that way. Note that printing onto FABRIC is tricky- the ink from an inkjet will likely smudge into the fibres and make symbols almost impossible to read. You might instead print onto image transfer paper and iron that onto the fabric.
SUPPLIES
We aren’t currently aware of anyone that has adhesive cloth you can print on, or a service for that.You can obtain diamonds in 5D or round from , from a variety of international stockists. Here are a few:
https://paintwithdiamonds.com/products/wholesale-diamonds
And PixelHobby
