USN Ribbons Chainmaille Inlay

I've been quite impressed with all the chainmaille inlays I've seen on the various blogs/forums. So I decided to give it a shot myself and see how they turn out. Many thanks to zlosk for his Irregular Grid Painter program. I've only just begun to tinker with this program, but I've already had some incredible results. So far have 2 inlay projects that I've decided to work on.

The first one I've got pretty much as set, I just need to buy the rings and start assembling. I decided to put together a sheet of European 4-in-1 using anodized aluminum rings to make a representation of the ribbons I earned while in the US Navy. First I had to come up with a picture of all the ribbons I had (in their proper order of course). This was actually pretty easy as I found a web site that created a graphic after you checked boxes for your ribbons. This is what I got:The next thing I had to do was to simply the colors on a pixel level so IGP didn't take forever to process and to minimize the number of colors I'd need rings for. Some colors got changed based on the colors I had available to me, for example the navy blue of rifle and pistol marksman ribbons became black). This is what I got:Next I had to resize the image so I didn't end up with an inlay 1000's of rings wide. Once I resized I had to work with the colors on a pixels level again to smooth things out a bit. I also needed to rework the "E" on my Battle "E" ribbon which allowed me to add the E's on my rifle and pistol marksman ribbons as well. Things are a bit fuzzy when zoomed in, as expected, so I figured I'd plug in into IGP and see what happens. This is what I got:Things are a bit fuzzy when zoomed in, as expected, so I figured I'd plug in into IGP and see what happens. I input my file into IGP and selected the appropriate chainmaille pattern and approximate ring size and out it spits your graph:I will be using rings in 9 different colors and each ribbon will be made up of 350 rings. Using bright aluminum rings for the top corners this will put my ring count at 4200 rings!