The Blog

Diego Armando Juarez Viveros is a crochet artist that lives in Oxnard, California.  Even though he was born in the United States, he is passionate about preserving his family’s cultural Mexican roots through his artwork.  You can read more about him in this article from remezcla.com.

Particularly interesting is the way he uses technology to chart out his designs.  A square graph does not represent the shape and scale of the crochet stitch.

I’m pretty good with technology and one day I was like, ‘I know that I clearly can’t use square graphs ’cause it doesn’t really work.’ A hexagon graph worked better for what I was trying to accomplish.

I spent a whole day trying to figure out how to take a picture and put a chart over it. So the chart that I use is a chart that I made. I go on Photoshop and take a picture- it could be any picture- and I have to paste it on Photoshop, then place a chart over the picture and scale down the colors. Most pictures have millions or thousands of colors so I have to use Photoshop first to [reduce it to] 3 or 4 colors].

I started recently learning Adobe Illustrator, because a lot of things

I like to make, I like to draw them out first. Not everything. Some are based on actual photographs; other things are based on drawings that I’ve made. The eagle that I crocheted is an eagle that I drew. The scorpion and the serpent are things that I drew myself. The Aztec dancer is a photograph of me that I took in 2006.

I started going online and started searching as much as I could about crocheting…I ran into videos by Carol Ventura, an author who specializes in tapestry crochet techniques.

I realized that what she was doing was very similar to what I wanted to do so I looked into her videos, analyzed how she was doing it, and took parts of her technique. There were still other things that were missing, so I took it upon myself to experiment until I could find out ways to get all of my lines neat, clean, with no bleeding colors.

I actually crochet backwards, so I have to envision it in my mind in 3D. So I look at the chart forwards, but I have to imagine it backwards.