Full Drill or Partial Drill? How to Choose for Your Own Chart
You have picked your photo, made a chart, and then a small question stops you: do I cover the whole canvas, or only the picture?
If you only ever bought full-drill kits, you may not have thought about it. Every cell had a drill. Done.
But try a full-drill chart of a portrait, and you can end up placing three thousand drills of pale blue sky behind a face that took four hundred. The sky is very patient. You, by the fifth evening, may not be.
Partial drill is the other option, and it can make your own charts easier and better looking.
The difference
Full drill means every cell on the canvas gets a drill. The picture fills the whole piece, edge to edge.
Partial drill means only some areas get drills. The rest of the canvas stays bare, showing the printed or plain surface underneath.
Neither one is more "real". They are two ways of making the same craft, and they suit different pictures.
When partial drill is the better choice
Portraits. Do the face, hair and shoulders, and leave the background bare. The person stands out, and you skip thousands of background drills.
Text. A name, a date, "Merry Christmas". Lettering looks crisp when it sparkles against a calm background rather than being swallowed by one.
Children's art. A drawing from a grandchild often has a figure, a sun and a lot of white paper. Partial drill keeps the white paper looking like paper, which is rather the charm of it.
Pets on a plain ground. If the cat is sitting on a cream rug, you may not need the rug at all.
Full drill is still lovely for landscapes, flower fields and anything where the background is part of the picture.
The rule about bare areas
This is the one thing to know before you print.
Areas you leave undecorated print as clean paper. They get no codes and no symbols.
That is deliberate. If the background were covered in tiny symbols you would have to ignore them, and your eye would keep getting pulled to them. A clean blank area tells you plainly: nothing goes here.
It also means the legend only lists colours you will actually place. Your drill count is smaller, and so is your shopping list.
How to tell the tool which colour is the background
In Mosaic Lab, the tool works out the colours in your photo and groups them. To leave the background bare, you tell it which of those colours is the background, and it treats cells of that colour as empty.
A few tips that make this go smoothly:
- Choose a photo with a plain background. A wall or a cloudless sky gives the tool one big colour to mark, which is much easier than a patterned bench.
- Look at the preview afterwards. Check that bare areas are where you expect them. If a bit of the sky is hiding in the hair, or a bit of fur has been marked as background, adjust and look again.
- Watch for look-alike colours. If your subject's colour is close to the background, such as a white dog on a white sheet, the tool may mark parts of the dog as bare. A different crop or a slightly different colour count usually fixes it.
What to expect when you work
With a partial chart, you will see clean paper around your decorated area. That is correct.
When you stick the drills on, you might like to leave the canvas cover film on the bare parts until the end, which keeps the surface clean.
Edges matter more in partial drill. With no background drills to soften the outline, the edge of a face or a letter is on show. Take your time there, and keep your rows straight.
So which one?
Ask yourself one question: is the background part of the picture, or only the thing behind it?
If it is part of the picture, go full drill. If it is only behind, try partial. You will finish sooner, spend less, and the person in the portrait will be the first thing anyone sees.