Introduction

The diamond art scene in Australia leaves much to be desired when compared to the United States. That’s why Create Love Share was founded! We want to give our Aussie customers a better choice when it comes to nurturing their crafting addiction. Diamond paintings can take a long time to complete and are usually framed or given away as gifts as high value items. Here’s how to not get caught out with a cheap product!

Part 1 – Diamond Art Design

The number one thing customers care about is the quality of the design! Here’s what the industries don’t tell you about: there are two very distinct ways to design diamond art. 

1. Automated Design

As the header suggests, this type of design is almost completely automated by some designing software. A picture is fed directly into the software and it produces a colour matrix that tries to roughly match the colours of the original picture.

If you are a part of any diamond painting groups, you may have heard of the term “confetti”. When you purchase either a custom kit or a cheap stock kit from a huge marketplace, the colours will tend to be chaotic and messy. Something that looks like it should be one or two solid colours might end up being 10 or more!

This is how a section that should be all black ends up being different shades of blues, purples and maybe even some unrelated colours like green or red. Ah, so that’s why it’s called “confetti!”.

Dot matrix preview simulation sample of "Sea Breeze Trail" - Automated Design

2. Hand Designed

When a design is done with real human hands, it’s called a hand designed diamond painting! In this case, an expert artist looks over the computer generated chaos and sees what can be improved. Usually that means many “confetti” colours are substituted out so that objects have consistency.

The designers painstakingly look over each and every dot of colour to see what can be improved. This process can easily take anywhere between 2 up to 8 hours for really large canvases. But the results speak for themselves!

Not only does the final design look better than the fully automated version, they’re much easier and comfortable to do! You, the diamond painter, will be able to do large swathes of similar colours in one go and your immersion in the activity won’t be constantly disturbed with the need to switch colours continuously.

This is a direct result of the design software not knowing how to reproduce a certain colour spectrum. The drill colours are limited after all!

How do you know if a design is automated or hand-designed, before you buy it? Usually the shop you buy it from won’t tell you or they will pretend to not know the difference. But here’s a tell-tale sign: if they’re offering multiple sizes (more than 4), they probably haven’t invested the time and money into hand designing. After all, hand designs area expensive to produce and require a lot of stock to be produced. If the store you’re looking at is offering 5 different sizes (usually more), they’re doing print-on-demand automated designs every time you place an order.

Dot matrix preview simulation sample of "Sea Breeze Trail" - Hand Design

Next up, we cover everything what you should know about diamond drills; which if you don't know, is the official name for the sparkly, tiny diamond beads that come with every kit!

Click here to read on.