Design a Digital Cross-Stitch Pattern in Canva | Rebecca Wilson | Skillshare
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Design a Digital Cross-Stitch Pattern in Canva

teacher avatar Rebecca Wilson, Artist and Illustrator

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Cross Stitch Intro

      1:25

    • 2.

      Cross Stitch Tutorial

      13:27

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About This Class

Inspired by the traditional art form of cross-stitch, this class is going to teach you how to make an x-based illustrative design using Canva. We're going to be establishing a technique using the grid tool, then exploring three different ways you can use images or text as a guide for creating your cross-stitch inspired piece. 

This project isn't complicated, but it does have a lot of repetitive tasks! You'll like it if you enjoy playing games like Tetris or have a lot of patience and find methodical projects to be meditative. You can set your own "challenge level" by picking a bigger or smaller grid - 10x10 will be easier, whereas 25x25 will take you much longer. We'll start with an easy piece together and then you can decide where to go from there!

You're only going to need a free Canva account to do this project, so you can get started right away. It's a fun technique with a lot of potential for all kinds of end projects - greeting cards, wall art, the back of business cards, and more. You can also use this as a way to design patterns for actual cross-stitch projects if you enjoy needlework as well!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Rebecca Wilson

Artist and Illustrator

Teacher

Hi there! My name is Rebecca, and I'm a full-time creative. I'm an artist and illustrator, art YouTuber, Etsy seller, and small business owner. Most importantly, I love teaching creative people like you!

In a past life I was a university lecturer and researcher. I loved every (stressful) minute of it, but I am so thrilled with the twists and turns that led me to my entrepreneurial life. I've been full-time self-employed and doing creative projects since 2017!

My goal is to provide practical, hands-on skills along with knowledge that can only come from experience. Everything I teach is something that I really do - usually as an income stream or as a client service. I was always told that I had a gift for explaining things clearly in a way that anyone can understand, and I h... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Cross Stitch Intro: If you're looking for a fun Canva project to help you improve your skills and create something really cool and also you don't find a lot of repetitive clicking, then this is the class for you. In this class, we are going to be creating a piece of cross stitch art. So not real cross stitch, but, like, a graphic that looks like it, which you can use as a social media post. You can make it into a wallprint. You can do basically anything your heart desires. I'm going to be teaching you the technique, and then you can use your creativity to make anything else. Was inspired by this project when I saw people making cross stitches out of, like, big pieces of pegboard where they were, like, weaving yarn in between the holes. And I thought, Well, I don't have the tools to do that, but I do like making canva projects. So I came up with this method. It's using the grid system and some graphics and just some cool layering to help us guide the color choices for our cross stitching. Yeah, we'll get into it, but I think it's really fun and creative. I'm quite proud of this one, and I hope you like it, too. All you're going to need in terms of materials is a free canva count. You don't need anything else, but you could pull in your own reference photos if you wanted to use something to base your cross stitch off of. We're going to start with something pretty simple, and you'll see really easily how you can scale this up to make much more complicated designs, but starting with the fundamentals is important, I think. I think this is also a good project to help you design cross stitch patterns if you do actual cross stitch with needle and thread. I've tried it out recently, and I think there is a lot of overlap in terms of the practicality here. So with all that being said, let's head into the project, make something really unique and have some fun. See you there. 2. Cross Stitch Tutorial: All right. Welcome to our Canva Cross Stitch Design course. We are going to be making some projects today to learn how to do this technique and then you can use your creativity to make it as many different ways as you like. I want to show you a couple examples, and then I'm going to walk you through the process of how I create these and then we'll do a little sample together. Sounds good. Okay. So my first example here is a little heart. I based this off of a piece of pixel art I found in the Canva Elems library, which I think is a great technique to get started with this. As you can see, these are all individual little Xs, and I've just done a white background here. I think it gives a nice effect. It does sort of look a little bit like cross stitch mixed with pixel art. I guess that's the best way to put it. I also did an example here doing words using this, and I will show you that I basically used a pixel font as the guideline for these letters. Third example is this one, just a little bit more complicated to show you that you can do something with some different colors. This is like a sort of gradient effect in the lower half. And basically, you can get as complex as you want. Now, this project can be a little tedious because there is no way to really select all and change all the colors at once. We are changing them one at a time. But we'll talk through some strategies to make that a little less annoying and move a little faster. But ultimately, this is not a project if you can't handle repetitive tasks, so keep that in mind as we go forward. Now, that's basically our overview of the concept. So now let's talk about how we actually make this happen. Going to find a graphic to be our subject, and I'm just going to go into elements. Like I said, as a starting point, I'm just going to look for pixel art, and lots of these have the pro icon. If you're doing this method just to sort of learn the technique and you don't have a Pro account, you can just turn that off to search for free items, and there's still lots of pieces you can work with. I think this little kitty cat is actually very cute and very simple. So let's use this as our example. I'm just going to leave her there for now. And we're going to go into the grid tool. This is up in file settings and add guides. I'm going to go into custom, and we're going to remove the gap, so it says zero. And then we're going to play with columns and rows. And basically, this is going to give us a grid. So if I do six columns and six rows, you'll see that I have this size grid. So let's just start with 20 by 20, and we'll hit Add Guides. These guides are added and locked, so I can't mess around with them. Next, we're going to take our little sample kitty here, I'm just going to try and make it the size so that each individual pixel roughly lines up with a box that we just made. Now we just need our Xs. Now, your temptation may be to just use the font option and add a text box with an X. But what we actually need is an X that perfectly fills a square. So we're going to go into elements and just search for X, and you get a lot of options. You want to test them out by just try clicking on it and seeing if when you put it to a corner, if it fills the box all the way, as you can see with this one, it actually doesn't fully make a square, so that's not a good option. I believe this one down here, this orange one might be a good choice. Yeah, so that one fits the square perfectly. So we will go with this, and we can also change the color of it, which is the goal. Now, the first step basically is to fill this entire grid with the X shape. Before I do that, though, here's a tip just to save yourself. If there is a color that is predominant in your design, I would recommend that you change the first X to that color. That way, when you are going to change all the other ones, you aren't having to do that one because the Xs are already that color. So, for example, with this apple, it is mostly this red color. I did not know this tip ahead of time when I was doing it. So when I did it, I did blue Xs, and I had to change each of the ones red. If I just use red Xs to begin with, I would have only had to do the details. So let that be a lesson to you that you should pick the color that is predominant in your intended design. This one, it is pink. In order to change this to that color, we will just go to color, and I'm just going to add new color and use the dropper tool and just pick that pink color. So there we go. Now I will drag this to the top corner, and I'm going to duplicate it. And once we've moved it over once, if you have not clicked elsewhere, you can continue to hit Duplicate, and it will just continue the same spacing all the way along. You can also use Command D on the keyboard if you're using a Mac, which is just the duplicate tool. Now that we've got all of those, I'm selecting them, duplicating it again, moving it down, and then we'll just do the same thing. Duplicate. I'm just hitting Command D on the keyboard to duplicate it and retaining the spacing. Okay, now we have Xs over this kitty cat. The first thing I'm going to do is remove any of the Xs that are outside of the design, just to simplify things. So I'll select all of those and delete them and delete those. Another option is, of course, to only place Xs on spaces and not have to do this erasing, but I find it is much more time consuming to do that. It's a lot faster to just cover the whole thing and then individually remove the blank space ones. Okay, now we have everything but the cat deleted. So we are going to just change the ones that don't match their background. It's kind of like a little game if you like really weird games. The process is pretty straightforward. I'm going to click on this one, change the color. I will select the dropper tool and just move to the background of that square, and it goes invisible. And once all the s are basically invisible, you're done. So I'm just going to click, click I'm afraid I haven't come up with a faster method than this to change all the colors. And if I use this change all tool, it would change the ones that I had already set to the right colors. So just one by one, I consider it sort of like a meditative design project. And because I care about your viewing time, I'm not going to make you watch me do this whole thing. I will speed it up. And we will do it instantaneously. All right, there we go. That is the finished clicking and recoloring process. Just as a small note, I was just thinking as I was doing that, Canva will allow you to batch recolor things in their basic shapes collection. So I just went to see if there was an X and I couldn't find one, see if nothing came up. But when I searched for cross, it gave me this one. It comes in this rotation, which is not correct for cross stitch. So I tried rotating it to fit within the grid, and it sort of gives a buffer around it. It's not a bad option if you wanted to go this route. I just don't think it looks as nice as the regular Xs, so just another just letting you know there are maybe other ways around this. I think the visual effect of this method is best. Okay, so now we have finished, and it's time to do the reveal, so I'm just going to open up the layers tab again and get our kitty cat. I will unlock the cat and delete it. And there is our design. The last step is to remove the grid settings and just clear guides. And there you have your first piece of digital cross stitch art. It's pretty simple in concept, and I think the visual effect is really cute, but it does take obviously quite a bit of clicking and sorting out to make it happen. So I think there is still an interesting technical aspect to this kind of creation. And also, I'll note that for animals, it does sort of look like have little x out eyes. So maybe just keep that in mind when you're making design choices. The next example I'll show you is just quickly how to do text using this, which you could combine with different elements as well if you want to do more complex designs. So let's do a very quick text block. I'm going to add a text box just tapping T on the keyboard, and the font that I'm using is called PixelonPixelens, LEllence with pixels. So I'm just going to make it bigger, and I like this one because it's very square and all the letters are made up of square blocks. So I'm just going to write high because we're just going to make this really simple for demonstration purposes. And again, I will turn on the grid. We can even do a smaller one this time. Let's do 15 by 15. Now I will try and line up these squares with the grid. This is not going to be as perfect as you might like because there are little gaps in between these ones. So I'm just going approximate, and you may want to move around the base guide as you do your square designing. So for example, I'm just going to focus on one letter at a time. So let's work on the H first. So I'll put it starting right over here, and that's more or less on a grid, paste in our X. I'm going to do this in a bright color just so we can see it easily. So let's do this purple, perhaps. Again, going to put it in a square, make it the right size. For letters, you can definitely do the fill the grid and do the subtraction method. Since I'm just doing a little word, I'm just going to copy and duplicate them each time. I'm just making sure that they are syncing up in the boxes correctly and just using the duplicate feature every time. Now, this obviously doesn't perfectly line up, so I'm just going to move this to the next block down. Even though it's only three in the template, I'm just going to do four. And then we will fill in the rest, like so. Now we can do the I. So I'm just going to grab this bottom one and just move it slightly, so it's a little more bit aligned. But you can basically just look at the letters and just say it's three up, and then four down, and then another three. So you don't really even need to map it out with the graphic. You can just use it for calculating the shapes. Obviously, this gets more complicated the longer the sentence or string of words that you're doing. There you go. I can just delete the text box, and that's the method for doing it with text. Finally, I'm just going to show you a non pixel image, how you can still create really cute pixel style graphics. So we'll add a new page after this apple. Let's try this orange just for a bit of a challenge. I'm going to make it quite big, and we'll use some smaller Xs for this one. Let's do 25 by 25 for this one. And that's just because there is more detail here, and I'd like the Xs to be smaller to capture that. Now, I've got my first it X, put it in the top corner. I'm going to do the full grid and then some traction method. And I'm going to change it to the color of the orange, that is the biggest color in our design. Okay, now we are ready to start removing squares. Some of them are obvious, like these ones that don't cover anything. But as you get closer to the design, it may be harder to decide which ones to remove and which ones not to. My general rule is if it's 50%, then I will probably leave it. If it is mostly white or more than 50% white, I will remove it. So, for example, this one I would take out, this one I would leave, and you can always add them back in later if you feel like you took off too. May look kind of jagged and maybe, like, not perfect when you are doing it at this stage. But once you remove the bottom illustration, it kind of all comes together because you're no longer looking at the perfectly drawn image beneath. You're just sort of looking at the impression that the Xs give. So there we go. I think this is good. So you probably know the drill. I'm just going to go in and find the colors I want. There are some smaller details in this one, and I'm just going to try and not stress about them too much. There is, like, a light green stripe that runs through this leaf. So I'm just going to very roughly kind of pick a few along to change that color. There's two tones for this sort of shading from the image below, and I think I'll probably reflect a little bit of that darker one, but mostly the mid tone. Okay, so there we go. That is this design. Let's remove the background and see how it looks. There you go. I think you could tell that's an orange. And I think these designs also look really nice when they are made small. So, if you look at them in the grid view, these are all our examples. I think they look pretty good. You can kind of tell what they are. And they also look good on different colored backgrounds. You don't have to keep it white, so you could make it like a fine color. Just find something that works with a particular design that you've made. That is it for our design lesson. And basically, you can take this and get as detailed as you want, do as many grids. You could do 100 by 100 if you're feeling super ambitious. Now, as for a class project, I would love to see a piece of digital pixel art that you make. So I'd recommend you either do one of the three methods, either find a piece of pixel art in the Canva library to use as a stencil. You could use that font pixelens to create a word and do that. Or if you're feeling like diving into the deep end right away, find a piece of clip art, and try doing a 25 by 25 grid. No matter which one you pick, whenever you are done, I would love to see what you came up with. I'm super curious how people are going to use this. So feel free to export this as a PNG or JPEG and upload it to the class project so that we can take a look. I'm super excited to see what you've created. If you have any questions or any tips, maybe ideas on how to make this even better, then pop into the class discussion, and we can chat about it together. If you enjoyed this project, I have lots of other fun DIY Canva projects that are sort of this vibe, as well as classes on things like entrepreneurship, selling on Etsy, and bigger graphic design projects. And if you wouldn't mind taking the time to review this class, that would really mean a lot. Not only do I appreciate the feedback, and I read every single one of them, but it also helps other students like you to find out that this is a cool class that they might want to take. And that's it. There. There's a message. Thank you for finishing this class with me. I really appreciate you being here. Hope you had fun and learn something new. Feel a little bit more confident designing in Canva after this, and I'm looking forward to seeing your work. Good luck with your designs, and I'll see you later.