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Stitching |
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| Create a new image. File-> New. Here, I've made it 250x250. You can use any background color or pattern fill you happen to have. |
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Create the stitching. Set your foreground swatch to whatever color you would like your stitches to be, here I've used B7671F. Set the background swatch to null. Click on the  or the  Pen tool. In the tool ribbon for either tool, set the Line Style to Dashed and the Width to about 4. Drag out your shape or draw your line. Selections-> From Vector Object. Layers-> Convert to Raster Layer. |
See a screen capture of this step. |
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Countour the stitching. Layers-> New Raster Layer. Effects-> 3D Effects-> Cutout. Set Offsets both to -2, Opacity to 100, Blur to 4 and the color swatch to black. Layers-> New Raster Layer. Effects-> 3D Effects-> Cutout. Set Offsets both to 2, Opacity to 100, Blur to 4 and the color swatch to white. In the layer control palette, decrease the opacity of these two layers until you get an effect to your liking. The amount of opacity will depend entirely upon the stitching color. Here the black cutout is set to 70% and the white cutout to 60%. Click on the background layer, Layers-> New Raster Layer. Effects-> 3D Effects-> Drop Shadow. Set the Offsets both to 1, Opacity to 100, Blur to 3 and the color swatch to black. In the Layer Control Palette, decrease the opacity of this layer. Here I've set it to 30%. Selections-> Select None. |
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Make "holes". In the Layer Control Palette, click on the background layer. Layers-> New Raster Layer. Set your foreground swatch to a dark shade of your background color. Click on the  Paint Brush tool. Set the tool back to its default values. Set the size to about 6. Zoom in so that you can see what you're doing. Click at the beginning and end of each stitch. On the Layer Control Palette decrease the opacity of this layer. Here I've set it to 50%. |
See a screen capture of this step. |
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Texture the stitching. Depending upon the size of your stitches, they may need some texture to appear more realistic. Click on the stitching layer. Adjust-> Add/Remove Noise-> Add Noise. Check Gaussian and Monochrome, set it to about 30%. |
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Optional: Make the stitches imperfect. Real handstitching is never perfect, even with guidelines drawn some stitches will not be perfectly straight. We can replicate this effect by using the Warp brush. In the Layer Control Palette turn off the visiblity of the background layer by clicking on the eye icon. Click on any of the other layers, right click and choose Merge-> Merge Visible. Turn the visibilty of the background layer back on. Make the merged layer active by clicking on it if it's not all ready the active layer. Click on the  Warp Brush. Set the Mode to  Noise. Set the brush back to default, change the Size to about 50 and the Strength to about 25. Drag over the stitching. When you're happy with it, hit the  Apply button. |
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