After doing the digital painting, I import the image to another piece of software. This converts the RGB values to thread colours. I put a hard limit of 200 colours (out of a possible 505).

Like the dragon, I manually inflated the max colour limit by adding some floss from other lines. The stars (which are hard to see) will be a sparkly blue. The pink and white in the crystals will also sparkle, as well as areas in the grass. For some of it, I'm using metallic floss, which is a single colour. For the crystals and grass, I'm using a blending filament, which sparkles in a variety of colours. The river also uses both metallics and filaments for a variety of sparkles.

The conversion process also seriously muted the colours. I'd overblown the colours in the digital painting to make sure I got the brightest colours possible when I stitch this. The stitched colours are always bolder and more saturated on the fabric, so the fact that this is washed out a bit is normal.

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