So I usually do more informative/tutorial type cross stitch articles here. But this month I threw some sillier, fun options into the mix for my Patrons to vote on, and this is what they chose; a pattern design challenge. Well, technically, they voted for me to take a break this month because they’re awesome. But I’m stubborn, this got second place, and it sounded doable despite my packed schedule lately. So, here we are. I’ll just… take a break next month. Maybe.

Basically, I’m challenging myself to do some pattern design. With a twist: a randomly generated color palette! Because why not. Plus it gives me an excuse to show you all through my pattern design process. AND you get a free pattern. Win/win/win!

Now, I usually design first, then go through and pick colors accordingly. But it can be pretty fun to go the other way around as well. I recently participated in Spellbound Stitches, a collaboration between 6 artists to design using the same color palette. So maybe that was on my mind. But even then we sat down together before any patterning and brainstormed themes, color palettes, and so forth.

But what if the colors were random? Let’s find out!

Video Version

If you’d prefer a video, complete with pixel art time lapses, I have a video version of this as well! For those who prefer text based articles, keep reading! The PDF pattern will be in this post as well.

Picking Colors

Here’s what I did. First, I decided to go with Cosmo threads for this. Because I will take any excuse to use Cosmo threads. Then I pulled up the Cosmo checklist from my article on all things Cosmo embroidery thread. To make things extra random I sorted by color name, rather than by number or color. This made for a much more randomized list of colors.

I then instructed Google to pick a random number from 1-539. Now, there are only 501 Cosmo colors. But my checklist includes discontinued threads, headers, and so forth. So I just figured I’d re-roll if I got a discontinued one.

The plan was to randomize 10 colors, then add black & white. Because that way I had at least a guaranteed border/shadow color, and a highlight color. But I ended up pulling white during my randomization, so I only had to add black. I did get a pretty dark color though, so I may not end up using black either, we’ll see. Either way we have 10-11 colors to work with now.

Here’s what I’m working with.

Playing With Color

Now the fun part. Coming up with a concept. The first thing I did is pull all the actual skeins from my Cosmo collection and have them in front of me to see their ‘true’ color. I even pulled the DMC equivalents to see what I was working with.

I am still working on a Cosmo to DMC conversion spreadsheet, but in the meantime I just used the DMC to Cosmo sheet I made and did an old fashioned Ctrl+F to find the Cosmo numbers I needed. If there were two options, I pulled both DMC threads and compared them in person to decide which one was truer to the color palette.

Pulling the colors in person allows me to rearrange the colors to see how they work with each other. As well as how they bounce light or reflect onto each other.

Grouping them I find that the oatmeal is a pretty good shadow for the bright white. And that if I use black, I also have a ‘highlight’ in that Dark Shadow color. My style normally uses colors in threes, so I have a medium tone, a shadow, and a highlight. But I can work with this simpler dark and light palette. Probably.

The Sunkist Orange and Amber glow actually go really well together as a dark and highlight, even if more contrast than I would normally pick myself.

Similarly, Fawn could be used a shadow color for that bright Candy Pink.

The two greens are very different hues. But I could use them to complement each other as some sort of foliage perhaps? And that blue will make a lovely accent.

Overall it’s a fairly cohesive palette. I kinda lucked out.

Brainstorming Ideas

Now it’s time to at least come up with some general themes/ideas.
Moving the black/whites out of the way I’m getting very much retro rainbow vibes. Just lacking a more yellowy/orange color.

The muted tones definitely make me think 70s pop art, even if they’re not technically the right colors for it. I could see florals, mushrooms, and the like in this palette possibly.

Rearranging a bit, a lot of red-bellied birds are coming to mind. Maybe surrounded by greenery and pinky/purple flowers?

Sketching

After a few days of ruminating on these colors, I drew some squares in my sketchbook by hastily tracing a post it note. Then doodled some ideas.

Believe it or not, I tried scanning this in and… it was completely impossible to see. So you get a phone photo at a slight angle. Sorry.

Point being, these sketches don’t need to be detailed. Or even good. Just a general idea of what you’re planning to test composition.

Here I’m leaning towards the Rose-breasted grosbeak, or some retro 70s mushroom doodles.

Pixel Art

I now had a general idea of what I wanted my pattern to look like, and had gotten a photo of it over on my computer. So I resized one of those squares to 50×50 (the size I wanted my pattern) and added it to my first layer in Pyxel Edit.

Any pixel program will work, or you can use the PCStitch ‘underlay’ feature, or whatever winstitch/etc calls it. But Pyxel Edit is the one I’m used to. I also of course made my color palette in there based on the colors from my spreadsheet.

You’ll note resizing to 50×50 made my sketch blurry af. That’s fine, we’re just using it for general layout.

I then went in with color generally following the outline of my sketch, but editing where necessary to make the pixels make more sense, such as changing the arc of its belly to make the pixels smoother.

Eventually, I had a bird on a stick. Aaaaaand I hated it. I’m not sure if it’s the starkness from that grey and black, or the lack of a third color to shade in my usual style… but I just was not digging it.

This is pretty normal in pattern design tbh. First attempts don’t always turn out how you imagined it. Normally I’d add a few more colors or change up the florals entirely. But, uh. That defeats the point of using this very specific palette. So I pivoted.

Pixel Art: Attempt 2

Good thing I had a bunch of sketches to work from, right? Let’s go through it all again.

This time, the mushrooms from earlier. A little more simple design should help.
Not long into shaping my first mushroom I decided bold outlines were the way to go with this palette.

And yeah, that definitely helped I think. And hey, this time I didn’t even use the darkest black. Only the colors I actually pulled during the randomization process!

Plus I’m feeling much better about this pattern design, even with the very simple shading. Is it perfectly balanced and beautiful? Absolutely not.

But I’m also doing this from a randomly generated palette at the same time as adjusting to dayshift and packing literally all my belongings to prepare for a cross-country move. I haven’t exactly been in a creative mindset. So uh, I’m pretty pleased honestly.

Patterning

Okay, this part of the process I’ve discussed here before: Turning pixel art into a pattern using PC Stitch.

So I won’t go through all the nitty gritty details here.
Except this time I don’t have to spend ages looking at thread and trying to decide which exact shade of greens I want to use that work well both with each other and the rest of the palette.

Because the palette is already set! So all I have to do is import it to PCStitch and clean up any stray pixels I don’t need. In fact, since I was already using the exact RBG values from the PCStitch palette, for once it didn’t completely destroy my colors in import!

Compared to say, my attempts at patterning this iconic scene from Castlevania. Yikes.

Cleaning up Symbols

I also spent some time setting symbols manually and removing the background color. Going from this mess:

To this much easier to read pattern:

It’s a small detail to some. But makes a world of difference when working from it.
Are my symbols ever 100%? No. Which is another reason I usually test stitch my designs. I’ll find out during the process if any of these are too noisy/busy and hard to read, and usually do a few more tweaks before releasing the pattern.

But this time… I simply don’t have time to test stitch this, sorry. 🙁
Maybe once I’m done moving and have unpacked I can revisit this. If you decide to stitch it, absolutely let me know! I’d love to see it!

Make the PDF

PCStitch has a ton of export options, but I typically export to image and then add it to a Word template I created ages ago. I hate to go all “rest of the f*ing owl” on you with the rest of the pattern design process, but I do go over some of the export options in my PCStitch article, as well as in the video version of this RNG article.

Regardless, here’s the PDF if you’d like to stitch it yourself. Feel free to swap out all the colors though!

As well as a more PatternKeeper friendly version exported straight from PCStitch:

Conclusion

Would I recommend adding ‘randomize your color palette’ to your pattern design process? No, absolutely not. But it IS a fun way to challenge yourself, especially if you’ve been in a bit of an art rut like I have.

Am I 100% happy with what I came up with? No, not really. But I did enjoy the process and now have some fun ideas to maybe do in the future as well!

Do you like how it turned out? Let me know! 🙂