Coloring with knitting and crochet

By popular demand, a quick and dirty guide to how to make a picture like the one I did for 2015 Knitting & Crochet Blog Week Day 3. I used Adobe Photoshop Elements 13, but I suspect a lot of photo editing software could do this. What you need is the equivalent of the APE command Paste Into Selection.

1. I started by getting my black and white picture. I drew mine using Paper by 53 on my iPad, mostly because I don’t have a good setup for drawing on my desktop computer, but if you do, have at it. You could also scan a picture from a coloring book if it didn’t have a lot of detail.

2. Figure out what colors you’ll need for your picture. Now go through all your knitted and crocheted items and take close-up photos of the ones that are in those colors. (Don’t forget your UFOs.)

3. Get all these photos onto your computer and do any photo fixing you want to do before getting started on the main picture.

4. And now the fun begins. Open the drawing in your photo editing software and choose an area to color. Select that area. (I used APE’s Quick Selection Tool.)

5. Keeping that file open, open the photo of the color you want to use and select an area. Copy this selection.

6. Return to your drawing. Using the Paste Into Selection command, paste your copied selection into the area you’re coloring. In APE, you can use the Move Tool to move your copied selection around, which lets you put the prettiest bits where we can see them. You may realize at this point that your copied selection is too zoomed in or zoomed out for the effect you want. If that’s the case, cancel out and go back to your color photo to tweak it and make a different selection. Or, if necessary, take another picture of your project.

7. When you’re satisfied, deselect this area, which fixes your color in place.

8. Choosing another area, repeat steps 4-7.

9. When the whole picture is the way you want it, save it and do whatever you were planning to do with it.