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.