Crafted By Colette

Diamond painting is a fun craft.  It’s always annoyed me that it’s described as “a cross between cross stitch and paint by numbers” because it’s nothing like either.  But I like the concept.  It is like cross stitch in the sense that each square is a separate colour, like pixel art and Hama bead pieces.  And I guess it’s like paint by numbers in that the squares are marked by number/symbol to denote which colour they should be.

Okay, I guess it is a cross between cross stitch and paint by numbers.  I am convinced.

The first one I ever did was this unicorn – I do love me a unicorn.

And I made my own very wonky Slytherin crest with sticker paper and some of the left over “diamonds” from the unicorn.

These kits can be quite expensive, but if you go through sites like AliExpress you can find them for just a few £, if you’re willing to wait ages for them to arrive.

The next one I ordered was this very adorable rainbow abstract kitty.  I did a small portion of it, and it got lost in my to do pile.  It was about a year before I got back to finishing it.

When I finished it I dug the next one out of the to do pile.  It had been sitting there for a while, but I decided I was going to document this one for the blog.

As I said, when you get them from AliExpress they can be really cheap.

When it arrives, it looks like this.

Inside you have the standard tray, wax, and pen thing.  All kits come with these.

You also get a long strip of little packets containing your “diamonds”.

For some reason, this set came with two bags for #15, one of which was empty.  And #21 came in a baggie.  But whatever.

I like to decant my diamonds into little tubs like this, nice and organised, and resealable.  And I only spill some of those.

Actually doing the painting is very simple.  You dip the end of the pen tool in the wax, which helps you pick up the diamonds.  Then you shake out some of the diamonds onto the tray.

I forgot to take a photo of this, I don’t know why.  But here’s what they look like when they’re not in their container.  This was a spill, but it represents it pretty well.

You press the tip of the pen thing (which is hollow) over an upwards pointing diamond, and it picks it up.  Then you press it flat-side-down onto the sheet – after you’ve peeled back the plastic covering – and it sticks to the adhesive.

This little colour code tells you what colours go where.

The adhesive is very adhesive.  You have to be careful, or you end up with gunk on your piece.  I am not careful.

This one didn’t take too long to finish, relatively.  The bigger ones can take weeks.

And it’s not perfect.  I have some random diamonds in the wrong place, and they aren’t all particularly lined up neatly.

There’s all kinds of dust and grime between the diamonds too.  Things get attracted to the little bits of adhesive that aren’t covered.  I did try to sweep out as much as I could.

But it’s pretty anyway.

I guess it can be a little hard to see what it is, because I picked a smaller version.  The bigger canvas you get, the more pixels the image has, the better the resolution.  Here’s the photo that it’s an interpretation of.

There will be more diamond painting posts – hopefully not too far in the future.  A semi-recent video by Baylee Jae on YouTube inspired me to do something special, it’s just taking its time to get sorted out.