I first heard about this waaaaay back on IGN's Animal Crossing board... when some guy posted a couple of great screenshots of his own picture used as an in-game pattern. I was annoyed I hadn't thought of it myself, since I'm in Photoshop all the damn time. The trick is to take an image and get Photoshop to pixelate it until it hits that 32x32 resolution and grayscale it so you can use AC's grayscale palette. I suppose you could have Photoshop approximate one of the other palettes, but sticking to grayscale is far easier. I believe that somebody eventually created a Windows app that does the same thing, plus that gave online AC user groups an easy way to share the pattern design ideas.

Here's what the image looked like in Photoshop. I got the image close enough to 32x32 to work, then set down some guiderules every 5x5 square. You need to do something like that to keep from going insane. Then I indexed the colors and opened up the Color Table so I could see the exact 16-pixel spread from white to black, with all the grays inbetween. Using the eyedropper, I clicked on a square on the image, and the Color Table showed me which of the 16 shades to use.

Back in Wild World, I started with a black background and stepped off white dots every five pixels. Then I filled in one 5x5 square at a time. I used the stylus to select colors (based on Photoshop's Color Table) and I used the d-pad and A button to lay them in, one dot at a time. For precision work like this, you have to use the d-pad. The stylus is great for freehand but it's not suited for pixel-accurate designs. The pixels are simply too small, unless you have a supremely steady hand.

The only problem I encountered was that the AC palette uses 15 shades and Photoshop was showing me 16. So I cheated on the white end of the spread, but it is impossible to tell in the finished product.

I put the finished pattern up in Mabel's shirt display, even though it makes a lousy shirt. However, now anyone who visits Adamsvil can grab a copy of it! (And if any wiseasses try to delete it, I'll always have the original in my own personal inventory.)

I placed it on the ground by the Town Gate, where I eventually may stick a TaleSpin image to balance out the promotional set. It looks really nice in person!

The whole project took about an hour and a half, most of that being the laborious process of clicking on the Mac and inserting the proper colors into ACWW. I can tell you I am now pretty damn sick of the French cafe music that plays while you're in the tailor shop.

Incidentally, Sable is now totally crushing on me. Maybe I'm working up to a discount or something.