#we'll be back to your regularly scheduled fandom silliness in just a bit

[wakebymoonsleepbysun]

Uhhmmm sorry for not working on my secret DJ project or writing anything but I realized this was close to being done so I spent the afternoon finishing the last of it.

The artist is yuumei-art here on tumblr (I'm not sure if they'd want to be tagged, apologies if I'm guessing wrong) and the kit was purchased from Diamond Art Club which DOES work with artists, so the art was used with permission and credited.

Slight PSA/ramble below

Careful about who you buy diamond paintings or counted cross stitch patterns from because so many sites are shit. (To the point where I've seen things listed as "counted cross stitch diamond painting" which is not a thing and it's highly unlikely that they're actually giving you both products with your order.)

A lot of them do not work with the artists, just grab pretty pictures and make patterns from them. Which is fine (imo) if you're doing it for like...an MCU movie poster or a Disney poster or some other hugely rich IP, less so if you're doing it to an indie artist. Where the line is on that will vary from person to person, but even if you don't care about that, there's another thing to consider.

It's very easy to just run a piece of art through a filter to limit colors/pixelcount and convert it into a xstitch pattern or diamond painting grid, but the result will often give you something that just looks like a crunchy jpeg. (Diamond Art Club and probably most of the diamond painting kids you'd find in craft stores do not do this as far as I can tell, or at least if they do they touch up the piece so you get those nice well-defined edges like what you see around the tiger's face.) This is less of a problem for xstitch kits because depending on the fabric weave, the smaller "pixels" give you a better DPI, basically.

Basically, if you're looking at a DP or Xstitch kit and they ONLY show you the art the work was made from, no finished piece or even a rendering of what the finished piece would look like...proceed with EXTREME caution because you'll probably get a jpeg with some amount of crunchiness to it.

...oh god nobody tell these companies about AI art...fuck...oh no...oh nononono....