I went over how to make a cross stitch pattern a few weeks ago, however, if you want to make a video game cross stitch, you actually have a slightly different set of options.

There are a few reasons for this, but the main ones are:

• You can edit your pattern heavily
• You work on a very small scale
• You work with a limited color palette

In short, you’re making far more of the pattern than you would normally. In the below example I’m going to go through the whole guide using a space invader being eaten by Pacman.

Collecting your sprites

If you weren’t aware, the little characters in video games are called sprites. And the first step for any project is to get the sprites needed for your project. There are loads of dedicated sprite websites out there such as The Spriters Resource and Sprite Database, you could always search google images for the relevant characters like I have.
However you do it, make sure you save your images as PNG. This is to make sure the image quality is still super high.

Resize your images

The chances are good that your sprites are the correct size to start, however, you’ll want to zoom in on the sprite to check, I would suggest something like paint, but Photoshop works well too.
You’re looking for is one pixel being over more than one pixel when zoomed in. If this is the case, you need to resize the image down to make sure its perfect. As you can see in the image below, we’ve resized the Space Invader. However, both pixel characters look good together, but I want an image where it looks like Pacman is eating the Invader, so I’ve made Pacman bigger.

Image editing

In the example below, I’m happy with the image I have, however, this would be the time you may way to change things. This could be changing the hair color, adding parts, removing parts or adding a background. The options are yours.
The great thing about video game cross stitch is you can do ANYTHING to the sprites you want.

Pattern creation

So now you have to make a choice, and it’s based on colors. One way (option 1) we’ll manually pick the colors out, the other way (option 2) this will all be done for us.
Colors are very important for any pattern if one color is slightly off, it ruins the look, however in video game cross stitch this is even more important, as the color of Pikachu is THAT yellow, so you need to make sure its perfect. There are two questions I ask myself; how many colors are there? and Will an off-color ruin it?
If the answer is more than 20 colors and it won’t ruin the pattern to have one off-color, then go for option 2. Otherwise, always go option 1.

Option 1

You’re willing to pick out your own colors; great! This is how I do most of my patterns. The even better bit about this, however, is you can do it all from your image editing program. The first thing you need to do is to check the options. You’ll see that you can add a grid over your image. Well, this is the grid of your fabric, you’ve just made a pattern!

But you do still need to pick colors. This is where a pattern chart comes in handy; you can see one here for DMC threads. You now need to select each color and pick a thread. Once you’re done, you can start stitching!

Option 2

The second option is a lot easier. We’re going to use an online pattern maker called MyPhotoStitch.com.
It’s super easy to use, just save your image, upload it, and it spits out the pattern, colors and all!

And that’s it! Easy.
 
Looking for something else? Check out our list of free cross stitch patterns for more.