I do not use any AI in the creation of my products or listing images. Annoyingly, some tools I have been using for years have mysteriously been re-branded as AI. Adobe is a particularly egregious offender here. Oh well.
My patterns all begin life in PaintToolSAI, where they are hand-drawn with a Huion Kamvas Pro 16. Older patterns were done on an ancient iPad, with Procreate. But my iPad doesn’t hold a charge these days, so I moved to my laptop (a Nimo, if you’re curious). Often, I’ll start with a photo so I can spend less time fiddling with composition and perspective.
I use a hard-edged brush to do all the line work on the patterns, which means they are drawn at the exact dimensions they are charted at. There is no downscaling process, which allows me to draw at the stitch level throughout the entire process. This serves several purposes. First, it eliminates the awful confetti that one normally finds around these areas on drawn patterns. Second, it makes it easier for the stitcher to alter their copy without having to account for the various colours that wind up blending with black. And as a bonus, since the patterns are easy to alter, I can offer the lineart-only versions to allow easier customisation.
The colouring process is often simple flat colours and cel shading, using the same hard brush. Detail is achieved by overlaying textures or using additional blending techniques to liven up large areas of flat colour. Occasionally I’ll stray from this style, and do something different, but the cel shaded drawings tend to make the best patterns.
Once I’m happy with the drawing, I import it into WinStitch. On import, limit the number of colours to be used, depending on the complexity of design. After import, I weed out more colours, removing anything below a given number of stitches. Ideally, I like each colour to have at least 100 stitches, and for the total colour count to be under 150. I’m happiest when the colour count can drop below 100. After I’ve done this, I go through each colour individually and make sure there are no random stitches out in space somewhere. I design these to be friendly for cross-country stitchers, so I try to keep each colour in clusters. You may have to carry your thread a bit, but you won’t have to carry it across half the project.
Because these pieces are rarely larger than 500 pixels across, I can draw and compile a pattern fairly quickly. Often the most time-consuming part is exporting the chart to its various formats.