What Does Pixel Mean To Diamond Painting?

1. What's pixel?

The term pixel is short for "picture element", and pixels are the tiny building blocks that make up all digital images. A digital image is made from individual pixels, much like how a Diamond Painting is made from individual small drills. 

When viewing an image at a normal zoom level (100% or less), the pixels are usually too small to notice. Instead, we see what looks like a continuous image, with light, shadows, colors and textures all blending together to create a scene that looks much like it would in the real world. But like any good magic trick, what we're seeing is really an illusion. And to break the illusion, we need to look closer.

For example, just look at the girl’s eyes in this photo, you can just see the white, brown and maybe little black, right?

Now I just click a few times on one of her eyes to zoom in on it. Each time I click, I zoom in closer. And if I zoom in close enough, we start seeing that what looked like a continuous image is really a bunch of tiny squares. These squares are the pixels. 

And if I zoom in even closer, we see that each pixel displays a single color. The entire image is really just a grid of solid-colored squares. There’re various colors in her eyes now: yellow, purple, green-mint, etc, which we can not see at the normal level.

When viewed from far enough away, our eyes blend the colors together to create an image with lots of detail. But up close, it's pixels.

2. What does pixel mean to Diamond Painting?

Just like a digital photo, Diamond Painting is formed by pixels too. Each small piece you place on your canvas is exactly a pixel.

It’s impossible for us to see all details of the photo when we see it at the pixel level and so does Diamond Painting. Working on a Diamond Painting means that you build it up by your sparkling drills, and at the near eyesight distance you can not see the entire picture, right? 

That’s why sometimes you feel that we send you the wrong color, compares to the original photo. All you need to do is just finish your artwork and when you hang it on the wall, look at it at the far distance, you must be amazed by how beautiful it turns out.

3. What’s different between small size & big size Diamond Painting?

To produce Diamond Painting Kit, we also base on the pixel of the original picture. 1 cm²  equals 4 drills on the canvas. When you place an order, we will scale the picture to match the size you choose, and the bigger size the canvas is, the more we zoom in on the picture. That’s also the difference in colors and details between several sizes of Diamond Painting.

It seems theoretical and abstract, right? So now I will give an example to make it one hundred times easier for you. Have a look at the picture below. In the left corner, you can see the leaves with only red color and maybe yellow between the leaves, right? 

For small size (50cm and below) canvas, we will zoom in on it like this, now you can see at the pixel level, there’re more colors added: dark red, light red, white, brown, etc.

For big size (from 50cm) canvas, the pixels will look like this. We can see even more colors we miss at the small size: green-mint, pink, gray, etc.

You can read the Diamond Painting Size Guide to refer more information and find the appropriate size for your picture.

4. How many colors of drill in a Diamond Painting?

As we always said, the number of colors in a Diamond Painting depends on itself! There're 2 elements that determine how many colors of drill: the size of the canvas and the complexity of the original picture.

• For small size canvas: We always prepare for you from 20 to 30 colors of drill, however, for complex paintings you'll have up to 40 colors.

• For big size canvas: From 40cm canvas, normally you'll have at least 30 colors of drill. Nevertheless, with the original pictures with less detail, there're only 15 colors of drill even for a big guy.

5. What do Diamond Painting Experts say?

Every Diamond Painting Expert knows about this trouble, and here're what they say:

Images are made up of many other colors. Don’t critique the colors too closely until you finish it then step back and look at it. If you take a picture and zoom into pixel level you will be amazed at all the different colors you see.

Colors are rarely the colors you see in the photo as they are made up of many other colors. Like white is never “white”. Pixel pictures (what Dps are) are made to look at from far away and not up close so you need the other color to make it read.

I mistakenly got the smallest size for my first Diamond Painting because I was unaware that I need a bigger picture to get good detail. I still like the way it turned out though! Just remember for future pictures, it's like pixel art. The bigger it is the more pixels which means more colors of diamonds, therefore more detail.