Home drawing challenge
This month I participated in a casual drawing challenge. The theme for the challenge was “Home” so we were supposed to design a home. A pretty general brief.
I put a little bit of thought into it before deciding to work with the classic expression “Home is where the heart is.” At first I thought I would realistically render a heart and style the insides like a dollhouse. As I was browsing references though, it occurred to me that it would make a kind of cool cross-stitch.
Next, I started sketching and playing with different techniques for getting a cross-stitch effect.
Things I wanted:
For the stitches to be sufficiently different from flat pixels
To not have to manually add in every individual stitch
For it to still feel like painting
My first try was to use a square brush with color dynamics turned up. This didn’t look at all like I wanted and was pretty time-consuming.
Next I defined a square Yarn pattern and used the lasso tool to fill selections. It was promising but I had difficulty getting the pixels on the edges.
Filling the background with the pattern made it a lot easier to keep everything on grid. This was really close to the effect I landed on. The last upgrade I made was to refine the yarn pattern and create both a light and dark variant of it.
I blocked the outside, walls, and floors with a lasso tool. Then I used the square select to get the square stitches on the outlines.
For the interior, it was a lot more work. Especially because I put the whole thing on a diagonal. It made it difficult to put objects on the right slope.
Once I blocked out the internal perspective it got a lot easier. I figured out a lot of the issues working moving from the first room to the second.
I added each of the rooms one at a time.
Last I added decorative stitches in some places and adjusted the colors one more time.
I ended up really happy with this. I don’t think I would try this effect again though. It wasn’t as satisfying as painting more realistically.
