Personalizing a Diamond Art Kit

I recently finished my latest Diamond Art project. It's a full-drill 12"x12" snowman and I love it! 

I made it with the Snowman Diamond Art kit by Leisure Arts (affiliate link here and throughout the post). This is what the finished design looks like if you follow the directions.... 

.... but I'm not much of a 'follow the directions' person when it comes to crafts (or cooking, for that matter). Here are the two designs side-by-side. See if you can spot all the changes I made.

  

There are five major changes: 

• replaced the light blues and creams in the scarf and hat with darker blues and purples
• turned the stubby red nose to an orange carrot
• changed the buttons from red to black
• thickened the arms so they weren't so spindly
• removed the dark blue mountain and moved some clouds in the background on the left

So how did I do it? The first step was deciding what changes I wanted to make. Then I used the colors provided with the kit to fill in anything that I DIDN'T want to change. With those elements completed, I dug through my Diamond Art storage and chose colors for the items I did want to change. 

Below, you can see that I've filled in the background and changed the nose, arm, and buttons. The red vertical stripes in the scarf are complete, so my next step was filling in with blues (and eventually purples). It took a little bit of trial and error to make things look the way I wanted, but it is really easy to pop up the gems after you've placed them if you aren't satisfied. 

I love the way the hat and scarf turned out. I'm happy with the carrot nose, too. In fact, my only complaint about changing up the colors is that there are a few places where the original canvas color shows through. You can see this in the black buttons - the area around them is clearly red. You can also see a tiny bit of red at the bottom of the snowman's arm where I widened it. I can live with that. 

With the Diamond Art and Diamond Dotz Freestyle Program, you can make your own design completely from scratch, or do like I did and alter a kit with a few replacement colors. I love the flexibility. Diamond Art is so much fun.