Needlepoint Canvas Painting

I haven't been posting a lot in the last few months, but I have been busy working on my art.

One thing I have been trying to do is to paint on needlepoint canvas.  A friend of mine (that's you, MK) told me that there are people who will pay to have custom art painted for them to stitch in.  I decided I'd give it a whirl.

I figured out how to break a photo into sections of color that could be stitched, but my color mixing needs some work.  The colors I was using seemed to match the photographs until I actually painted them.  My suspicion is that the white spaces in the canvas make the colors look grayed out.  I'm not even sure that the colors need to match thread exactly.  If you just give a roadmap to where the differences in color occur, can you give a legend to it with the real colors?  I need to explore a bit more.