Whats in a pattern

One of my favourite past times is creating patterns - I have a wealth of them sitting on my hard drive which I really need to share .. but (and there is always a but) hold back because they need some adjustment.

This adjustment is called "cleaning up" a pattern.  I use BeadCreatorPro 6 for my pattern designs - this program  has amazing design concepts allowing you to develop the depth and dimension of a design.

I'm involved in a facebook group "Bead Looming Intervention" and our first challenge is to design a an Art Deco inspired piece - this can be in the form of a cuff, necklace, hanging, etc which had some caveats attached to the design.  My piece was taken from this picture:

To commence the process, I worked in Adobe Photoshop to sharpen the image, cut back the unwanted areas and enchance the DPI.  When the pattern was first converted, it had over 100 colours and looked a little like this:

You can see that there is a lot happening in the image, it looks patchy, there are a lot of shadows that the pattern program has picked up and the overall picture doesn't blend.  Imagine looming that!  After many, many hours (I think 5 in total) the colours were blended together, I compared the "real" colours to the ones picked by the pattern program and the final "cleaned" up pattern is reduced to around 35 bead colours and now looks like this:-

If you scroll between the two pictures you can see there are  more clean lines, depth and dimension to the picture and the Art Deco Lady stands out more.

My beads have arrived and I'm now off to stage II of my cuff - the actual looming ... stay tuned.