How to turn a photo into a bead pattern

Start with the right picture

Bold shapes with clear edges convert best: a logo, a cartoon, a pet photo cropped close. Busy backgrounds and tiny details turn into noise at bead size.

Crop to the subject before you upload. If the background is plain, turn on "Remove background" so only the subject is beaded.

Choose the size in beads, not pixels

One large square pegboard holds 29 × 29 beads. That is enough for a simple icon. Faces and detailed pictures need two or three boards across.

Twice as wide is about four times the beads, because the height grows with it. Start small and go up only if details are lost.

Keep the colours few

Fewer colours make a pattern easier to buy for and faster to build. Try 8 to 12 colours for cartoons and 16 to 24 for photos.

Dithering mixes two colours in a dot pattern to fake the shades in between. It helps with skies and skin, and makes flat cartoons look speckled.

Tidy up by hand

Click a colour in the bead list to see where it is used. Swap colours you do not own for ones you do, or remove stray single beads with the eraser.

If you only have some colours, mark them in "My colours" and turn on "Only colours I have": the pattern is matched to your beads alone.

Print and build

Download the PDF: one page per pegboard, each peg numbered with its colour, and a shopping list on the first page. On a phone, Build mode lets you tick beads off as you place them.