A lot of my own cross stitch patterns are taken from video game sprites, and one of my great frustrations is that 2-D Mortal Kombat sprites are too detailed to easily make into patterns.

I've been able to find fan-made sprites of some of the characters--if you've been to my house you've seen my MK I and II Perler bead pictures--but nothing that I've really liked enough to cross stitch.  Until I discovered all the kharacters of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 in the style of Pokemon trainers.

Usually I try to stick with NES/SNES era sprites since they're much easier to work with.  Depending on what it is, I'll often simplify the number of colors in an SNES sprite since some of the shading doesn't read well at cross stitch/Perler bead size.

These are apparently DS sprites, which would explain why it's been so frustrating.  The kombatants are too complicated/time consuming to stitch off the screen, so I have been using high tech equipment such as graph paper and cheap colored pencils.

I finally got KG Stitch--a program that lets you import a picture and turn it into a pattern--and it's just giving me another level of frustration.  I guess my real objection is that computer pattern-making software is not magic and requires just as much (if not more) work as filling in squares on graph paper.

I was going to just use it for some shading help and color choices, but then it told me that Kitana's skin should be orange.  Another flaw in the "let the computer decide the colors" is that I'm up to 155 different colors of embroidery floss, so I really need to see if I can make do with what I've got.

Still, Minipop pattern making has gone well.  More on that once I actually start stitching something.