Pattern advice please. (with pics)

[pjl83]

Hi everyone.

 

After going through Travis' tutorial on GIMP pattern making (thankyou again Travis, fantastic advice ) I have spent some time going through lots of photographs on my computer and getting them to the point where I can start brushing the picture to turn it into a finished pattern. My idea was that before I buy my first saw (once the house move is sorted!) I could use some spare time to make up some patterns ready to cut.

 

It's going well up to this point, but the one thing bugging me is that the majority of the photo's I've used seem to have dark backgrounds at this point. I tried inverting the colours but then I end up with too many large black areas. I may be trying to run before I can walk, but as I mentioned above, I have some spare time before I have a saw so if I can get the pattern making sorted then I think it will be good for the future. I'll post one image as an example and see what you guys think I should do next. I didn't want to spend the time brushing the picture until I'm sure that it will work out well. It may be that I am trying to use "bad" photographs or maybe I'm just missing a trick or two

 

Here's the image........... what's your thought?

 

normal

 

inverted

 

Thankyou in advance

Paul

[Messman]

Paul,

 

I am not sure of the process you are using with Gimp. (I have not watched Travis's Gimp Series) Are you removing the background? Based on wht you are posting I can not tell if you are or not. Are you trying to change the settings to get closer to what you want?

 

Here is a series of three video's that I did for Photo Shop but can help with Gimp and the overall process.

 

http://www.scrollsawvideos.com/2009/07/ ... photoshop/

 

I hope they help you out some. I guess something that could help would be to post the original picture, that might help us help you better.

[dj21817]

hey im just starting out pretty much to make my own patterns but here is what i have to do when i have a dark background.i take and turn my brush to white paint and draw a outline around the figure im doing then paint the rest white .then i continue making the pattern and connecting it the white background which would be the wood and the black is what is cut out.hope it helped. i erased the background to hopefully show you what i did and meant.you can use this if you want then all you have to do is finish the person and the fish.good luck and have fun

[Travis]

There's a few ways to do this. But DJ's advice is probably the easiest. Take your original picture. With a white paint brush, paint directly on your photo layer. Zoom in about 200-300% and really snug the white paint brush up to the edge of your subject. You can use the shift-click dot-to-dot method to get really good control over your brush. Start with a small brush (3px or 5px brush) and outline your subject. Then move to a larger brush to paint out the rest of the background. Then go through the regular process of creating your base pattern.

 

Let us know if you run into any problems. We'd be happy to help.

[pjl83]

Thanks everyone. I'll give it a go and pot up the results.

 

Paul