My dad has this very old piece of cross-stitch art in his house. Every time I see it I'm struck by how much it anticipated 1990s pixel art on 16-bit micros like the Amiga, simply because the artist was working under similar constraints: a low-resolution grid of square pixels, and a strong incentive to use as few _different_ colours of yarn as possible, with much less constraint on what those colours should be – just as the Amiga and similar machines let you have a palette of 32 colours on screen at once but they could be chosen from a much larger space.
And the artist has used the same stylistic tricks to compensate for those limitations as Amiga artists did, or at least some of them. I could easily imagine someone having drawn this in Deluxe Paint, and perhaps even used it as an interstitial image in the middle of a period-themed Amiga game, with some important plot dialogue subtitled on the bottom.
I keep thinking it would be kind of cool to digitise it back to pixels + palette. But for proper style the result would have to be stored in an IFF ILBM instead of any more up-to-date image format.
I went once to an exhibit of the Gobelins tapestries workshop. Zone women explained that they used scissors blades to get some fluff and thus blur the stitches on diagonal lines. By the XIIth century, someone had discovered antialiasing.
Beautiful, Simon! I’ve been similarly interested in seeing pixel type from the lens of cross-stitch, weaving and knitting patterns, and studying traditional patterns across scripts has been nothing short of revelatory (I even wrote a little something about it last year https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?u=00db3d2423772a3f86d6e22a1&id=4fa7cefeef).
Vaguely remembering that old X11 displays had a similar constraint: there were 256 different colors max, dynamically mapped from a much larger set. Then, when the stuff displayed ran out of those colors, things got literally ugly...
@martinvermeer yes, I started writing X apps myself when that was still a real possibility. Indeed, the GTK version of PuTTY still has code in it to handle that case – search unix/window.c for function calls starting 'gdk_colormap_'! Surely hasn't been tested in years, though.
The standard Amiga GUI (at least in the original A500 days when I had one) just said "Here are the colours you have, use them or make your own separate Screen". X11's idea of trying to let multiple apps _share_ a limited-palette display and ask for the colours they need is much more ambitious!
I remember seeing cross stitch art in the mid eighties, and being confused at how much crossover there was between the super cool futuristic demoscene graphics of the homecomputer underground, and these ultra dorky grandma things.
@pixelambacht I think that this is actually tentstitch or another tapestry stitch rather than cross-stitch.
There were many adaptations of European tapestries onto canvas needlework patterns available from a firm in France in the 1990s. For those, one chose tapestry wool oneself rather than having it come in a kit.
Cross-stitch isn’t the only one that’s natively pixelated.
Even some of the rug hooking patterns that are trending again are very pixelated.
As you've probably already guessed, I'm not remotely an expert on tapestry or any other kind of stitching, and my interest in this kind of design is focused on its relevance to computers, so I just had to make my best guess out of types of stitch I'd heard of.
The use of long (horizontal) threads for the half-tones (as opposed to dithering patterns) also has parallels with compression under RLE (run-length encoding). Not sure if computer artists ever changed their style just for a few bytes under RLE, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ahoySoundtrack is available on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/album/6P6RP2Ad0L4klna5GdiBlIalso on Bandcamp:https://xahoy.b...
there were companies selling these images as kits, and designers working for these companies; it would be great to investigate their choices and processes..
I said in that post that it would be cool to digitise it back to a paletted image suitable for actually loading into Deluxe Paint. I didn't get round to doing it … but someone else did! https://kaberett.dreamwidth.org/ put in a *lot* of effort (more than I would have dreamed of asking for) and sent me a PNG.
I thought the only reasonable thing to do with that was to convert it back to IFF ILBM, transfer it on to an Amiga floppy image, and load it in _actual_ Deluxe Paint. Tada!
But even given a starting PNG, getting it into DPaint was a challenge. (1/8)
.jpg "painting by Johannes Vermeer at Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany")
