Travis

Welcome to Lesson 4. This time we get to work with an image! Yay! Well, don't get too excited. We're going to prepare this image so that it is ready for use in the next lesson where we really roll up our sleeves and start the pattern-making process. So this lesson is pretty straightforward and will go pretty quick. Besides, I covered a lot in the lasts lesson to keep you plenty busy...LOL. In this lesson, we'll download our image, prepare our pattern document, layout guidelines, and re-size our image. The Image I was trying to figure out what portrait I wanted to use in this class. Since we're doing a portrait pattern, I figured you weren't too interested in doing a portrait of my uncle Joe. So I figured a celebrity would have more of a wider appeal and be a bit more interesting. The tricky thing is to find a celebrity picture that doesn't have a lot of copyright restrictions. I guess most celebrity photographers want to make money with their pics. Who knew. I turned to WikiMedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons is the media repository for the Wikipedia project. The nice thing about this website is that it lays out the terms of copyright and license. That way we can see if it's something we can legally use. I ended up finding a nice picture of Captain Kirk...yup, Mr. William Shatner! If we look at the licensing terms, we can see it is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5 license. Basically, it says we're allowed to use this image whichever way we want, as long as the original author is credited and we release our derivative work under the same license. So Jerry Avenaim was kind enough to donate the image for public use under this license. How cool is that? Remember me preaching about a high-resolution picture? Well, if you look at the full resolution picture of William Shatner (click the image in Wikimedia Commons), you'll notice it is fairly small. While this is not an ideal size, I think it will work well for us. I chose this image because it really has a nice color balance. The contrast and highlights are very nice and the skin tones are even across the picture. You can clearly see all of the detail we'll need to pull a pattern from it. So, despite the fact it is lower-than-ideal resolution, the fact that it has all of these other things going for it will more than compensate for the resolution shortcomings. I'm confident this picture will produce really good results for us. You can download the picture here, or click the image on the left. Creating Our Pattern Document Go ahead and open up your downloaded picture into GIMP (File>Open). Here is our picture of Bill. We won't be using this document to design our portrait. If you look at the size of this image (Image>Canvas Size), you notice it is only 3.4x4.7". This is much too small to cut. Instead, we'll create a new document that is 8x10". I like working in this size because it's easy to find frames for the final cutting. So let's create our new document in which we'll be working on our final pattern in. Go to File>New and that will pop up a Create A New Image dialog box. This is where we'll set up our document dimensions. There is a template pull-down menu, but they don't offer an 8x10" option. So we'll have to make a custom document. Make sure your units are in inches (pull-down menu next to the Height field. It's pixels by default). Then it's just a matter of typing in our dimensions (8" for the width, 10" for the height). Now that we have the height and width set, we have to set the resolution. By default, the resolution is 72 pixels per inch. This is much too small. It makes it hard to get the detail you want out of a pattern. A popular resolution is 300 pixels per inch. This is overkill. It makes too large of a file for what we need. My favorite size is 150 pixels per inch. This seems to be a happy medium. Just enough resolution for me to get the detail I want, but not too much. Plus I know that a 3-pixel brush size is about the width of the kerf of a scroll saw blade. I also know that a 5-pixel brush size is the width of the kerf of a spiral scroll saw blade (#5 spiral). This is a nice point of reference when creating patterns and we'll be discussing brushes in more detail in Lesson 6. But for now, we need to change the default 72 pixels per inch resolution to 150 pixels per inch resolution. Click the + sign next to the Advanced Options. You'll see the X & Y Resolution fields there. Just change them from 72 to 150. There are a couple more options under the Advanced Options too. The color space will always remain RGB, so keep that at its default. For the Fill With field, let's choose white. This will create a white document, which is much easier to see and work with. The comments field is unnecessary. Click OK and we have our pattern document set! Creating Guidelines OK. We now have our pattern document. The size is 8x10". But since we're going to put this into a frame, a little bit of the frame will overlap our cutting. So we should take that into account. I figure if we have a 1/4" margin around our entire design, we should be pretty safe. So to help us to remember to keep that margin, we'll create guidelines. Guidelines are there for reference only. They will never be printed. You can use guidelines for alignment, marking reference points, or as in our case, creating margins. Creating a guideline is easy. You'll notice along the left and top of the screen, you'll see rulers. These rulers will be in inches. If not, change the units to inches in the lower-left corner of your screen (covered in Lesson 3). We'll also use the coordinate readings on the lower-left corner. So to create a guideline, click on the ruler and drag it out toward the center of your pattern. Keep an eye on the coordinates in the lower-left corner and drop the guideline at 1/4" from the edge. Continue doing this across all 4 sides of the document. If you mess up, you can hover over the guideline and it will change to red/pink. Click and drag to reposition the guideline. If you want to delete a guideline, drag the guideline back onto the ruler and it will disappear. Copy Our Image to the Pattern Document Now that we have our pattern document set up, let's stick our picture in there. Click the picture of Bill to make that window active. In your Layers dockable dialog box (see Lesson 3 if you don't have it), you'll see a layer called Background. You can drag this background layer onto your pattern document and this will copy the layer. Alternatively, you can highlight the layer and press Ctrl+C to copy the background layer to your clipboard. Then click your pattern document and press Ctrl+V to paste the image from your clipboard to your pattern document. Either method works well. Resizing Captain Kirk In the tool palette, choose the Scale tool (Shift+T unless you reassigned the shortcut). Click on the picture of Shatner and it will pop up a dialog box. You can scale an image in two ways. You can either type in the dimensions in the dialog box, or use the nodes on the picture. Nodes are the little squares at the corners of the picture and in the middle of the edges. Grab one of the corner nodes and drag it around. You'll notice that it will change the aspect ratio and really mess up the image (it gets really skinny or really fat). We want to scale the image equally along the X-axis as well as the Y-axis. Click the reset button in the Scaling dialog box to undo your previous scaling. You can constrain the aspect ratio in two ways. First, you can click the little linking chain next to the width and height fields. Then you can grab a corner node and the image will scale equally along the X and Y-axis. Alternatively, you can hold down the Ctrl key while dragging a corner node. That, too, will scale the image equally along the X and Y-axis. So continue resizing the image so that Bill fits nicely within your margins of the pattern document. Remember to constrain the aspect ratio while resizing. I have the edge of his hair along the top margin, and each shoulder touching the side margins. You'll notice that his shirt goes beyond the bottom margin. This is OK. His shirt isn't important information, so we'll just leave off any of the shirt that goes beyond the bottom margin. When you're happy with the image, click the Scale button in the dialog box to tell the computer this is the size you want it. The computer will recalculate the image to the size you indicated. Saving Your Image To save your image, go to File>Save. This will pop up a dialog box. Browse to the folder where you'd like to save your file. At the top of the screen, you'll see a Name field. This is where you name your file. One thing about GIMP that is cool, is you can add whatever extension you want and GIMP is smart enough to save it as that kind of file. So if you called it Shatner.jpg, GIMP will save it as a jpeg image. Since we want a raw file, we'll add the extension as xcf. So your image would be called Shatner.xcf. You can also just type in a basic name like "Shatner" in the Name field. Then go down to the pull-down box that says "All Images" and choose GIMP XCF image. Then when you press Save, it will add the extension for you. You can also click the + button next to Select by File Type and then choose GIMP XCF image. Either way will work. We want to save our image as GIMP XCF image because it holds all of our layer's information. This allows us to manipulate individual layers rather than merging down our layers into one. This will be important as we start working on our patterns. We'll cover layers in the next lesson. Well, that's it. Now we're ready to start working on our base pattern, which we'll cover in the next lesson. But before you close everything down, make sure you save! Assignment Download a copy of the William Shatner picture. Create a new pattern document at 8x10" and create your guidelines. Then re-size your picture to fit within the guidelines. If you are working on another portrait along with the class, do the same process with your other picture. Practice using guidelines and resizing pictures.

Welcome back, folks. In this lesson, we're doing a tour of the user interface and talking about customizing our tools. There's a lot to cover, so let's get started. When you first launch GIMP, 2 or 3 (or more) windows will open. First, you have the main screen. This is the big gray box that holds your picture. A small window will also open with a bunch of icons. This is your Tool Box (If you don't see it, go to Windows>Toolbox). And finally, one or more windows will also open. These are dockable dialog boxes that contain various functions. We'll cover each of these in the sections below. One unique thing about GIMP is that it uses floating windows. (GIMP 2.8.6 now offers Single-Window Mode, which is similar to the way most Windows programs operate. You can turn on/off this mode at Windows>Single-Window Mode. For this tutorial, it would be easiest to have it turned off so your screen looks similar to mine.) If you notice, none of the screens maximize to cover your full screen. As PC users, we are used to an application to fill the whole screen. GIMP uses floating windows instead, very similar to the way Mac and Linux systems work. It is a little strange to get used to at first, but once you do, you'll learn to love this way of working. It allows you to move your tools around the screen and make a nice work area. The main window does have an option to maximize the screen, but I don't recommend it. The reason is that if you are working on an image with the main window maximized and you zoom in, all of a sudden your toolbox and dialog boxes start covering areas you want to work in. It really messes up your workflow. So, instead, re-size the main window to a size you're comfortable working with that still leaves room for your toolbox and dialog boxes. Main Screen The main screen functions much the same way as any other application. Across the top, you'll see the menu (File, Edit, Select, View, etc). This menu holds all of the functions within the program. Whenever I learn a new program, I'll go through the menus and see what options I have. Also, note where your options reside and how they are categorized. Once you figure out the organizational structure of the program, you shouldn't have too much trouble finding the options you need. Go ahead and open an image in your main window (File>Open). Once you find an image, you'll notice the picture opens so you can see the entire image. You may want to re-size the window so that you have plenty of room for your toolbox and dialog boxes. One of the first things you'll notice, other than your picture, is a ruler that goes across the top and left of your screen. When you move your mouse around the image, you'll see a black triangle that shows you where your mouse is relative to the ruler. In the lower-left corner of the window, you'll see the coordinates of your mouse as well. Notice it changes when you move your mouse. These coordinates correspond to the black arrows on the rulers. This is very handy when you're trying to dial in a specific measurement. Next to the coordinates, you'll find a drop-down box. It defaults to pixels (px) when you first launch the program. We won't be using pixels in this class. Instead, we'd rather work with inches. So click the drop-down box and choose inches (in). You'll notice the rulers change from pixel measurements to inches measurements. The coordinates also indicate inches. You'll find the ruler pretty handy when scaling images or aligning items. We'll be using the ruler in the next lesson when we create our work area. To the right of the measurement drop-down box (lower left), you'll see another drop-down box. This contains percentages of zoom. You can select whichever preset you'd like to see as much or as little detail as you'd like. This is convenient if you want to see the image at 100%. But I usually will use keyboard shortcuts to zoom in and out of the image as I'm working. I'll cover the keyboard shortcuts in the Navigating The Image section below. To the right of the zoom drop-down box, you'll see an area that contains text (hover over the image). These are tool-tips associated with whichever tool you have selected in the toolbox. It will give you basic information on how to use that tool. One last section on the bottom left corner. Next to the scroll bar, you'll see a box with a dotted outline. This is a painted mask tool. When you click this icon, your image turns red. From here, you can use your paintbrush to paint on a mask. A mask is a way to make a selection (we'll cover this in Lesson 5). Using white creates the mask, using black removes the mask. When you're done creating your mask, click the icon again and the red disappears. But in its place, you'll see the selection in which you painted on. Don't worry, we'll explain what this is later and how to use it. OK. Let's move over to the bottom right. In the corner, you'll find a triangle made up of dots. This is your window resizing tool. Click and drag the dotted triangle and you can re-size your window. Just above this is a cross with arrows. If you click that, a thumbnail image of your document pops up and you'll see a white box (you have to be zoomed in on your main image). Drag your mouse around this thumbnail and you'll notice you're panning your main image. This is an easy way to navigate your image without zooming back out. In the upper left corner, you'll see a little arrow above the side ruler. This is a flyout menu and is basically the same thing as the main menu across the top. Flyout menus are all over the place in GIMP, so be sure to look for them because they offer easier access to many of your options. Lastly, let's look at the top of the screen. You'll find a lot of text. The first part is the file name of the document you have open. You may also notice an asterisk before the file name. The asterisk indicates the image has changes made to it but has not been saved yet. Next to the file name, you see parenthesis. Inside you'll notice it says RGB. This is the color profile of the image. Basically, we use Red, Green, and Blue to make up our images. We'll be working with RGB exclusively. If you don't say RGB, you'll have to change the color profile so that it is RGB (Image>Mode>RGB). Next to RGB, you'll see how many layers your project contains. It really doesn't make much difference. The more layers you have, the larger the file is, but we won't worry about that. It's not that important. Right after the parenthesis, we'll see the resolution of the image. In the last couple of lessons, we talked about the importance of resolution. The resolution is noted in pixels. Then at the end of all of this is the program name...GIMP. Tool Box & Options Let's look at the toolbox. As you can imagine, this is the section that holds all of the tools you have available. This can be customized to suit your own needs and we'll cover that in another section. Each icon indicates each tool. If you hold your mouse over the icon, a tool-tip will pop up and let you know what the tool is. Below the tools is a box on top of another box. This is your color selectors. By default, the boxes are black and white. The top box is the foreground color, and the bottom box is the background color. You can switch the order of these boxes by clicking the arrow button and the colors will swap places. If you have color in the boxes, you can go back to black and white by clicking the tiny black/white box icon to the bottom left of the color selector. To select a color, click either the foreground or background color. This will pop up a color selector. The foreground color is the color most of your tools will use (paintbrush, paint bucket, etc.). Some tools will use both foreground and background color (gradient fill). Below all of this is a dockable dialog area. By default, the tool options is docked. Whenever you click a tool, this window will change to offer you additional options for that particular tool. If you don't see the Tool Options dialog box, you can open the dialog box by going to Windows>Dockable-Dialogs>Tool Options. You can dock the dialog box to the tool palette (see Dockable Dialogs below). Take some time and look at the options each tool offers. Dockable Dialogs Dialog boxes offer options for tools and provide other information. We'll be using several dialog boxes while creating our scroll saw patterns. You can find different dialog boxes under Windows>Dockable Dialogs. Just select the dialog box you wish to open and it will pop up the window. Since having a bunch of dialog boxes open at once will quickly clutter up the screen, GIMP lets you dock the dialog boxes so several windows can reside in one main window. Each docked dialog will be separated by a tab. So selecting one tab will display the options of that particular dialog box. Clicking the next tab will show that dialog box's options, etc. Docking a dialog box is easy. Just select the dialog box name in the window and drag it over to another dialog box. You'll notice a black outline around the information area of the other dialog box. That tells you that you're about to dock the dialog box into another. When you release the mouse button, your dialog box will have its own tab. To remove the dialog box from the dock, grab the dialog box tab icon and drag it outside the containing dialog box. This will create a lone dialog box. You can either dock it to another set of dialog boxes or close it altogether. You can re-arrange the tabs of a docked dialog box by grabbing the tab icon and drag it over to the top of another tab. This will put you selected tab in front of the tab you just hovered over. Another way to add tabs is to select the little triangle flyout menu on each set of dialog boxes. Choose Add Tab and that will give you the same list as Windows>Dockable Dialogs. Remember that the section below the toolbox is also a dockable area. I like having my brushes dialog box docked into this area. Here are some of the dialog boxes I like having open. Tool Options and Brushes are both docked under the toolbar. I like having Layers, Channels, Undo History in its own dock. You may also want the Tools dialog box docked somewhere too for convenience while you're learning (we'll talk about that in the next section) Customizing The Tool Box Now that we have our dialog boxes customized, let's customize our toolbox. As you can see we have a lot of tools at our disposal. As scroll saw pattern makers, we have very specific needs and really don't need all of the tools offered. So instead of having those tools clutter up our toolbox, we can display only the tools we want. To do this, we need to open up the Tools dialog box (Windows>Dockable Dialogs>Tools). To do this, go to Edit>Preferences then select the Toolbox section (Updated for GIMP 2.86). You'll see a list of all of the tools available. Next to each tool is an eye. This controls the visibility of that tool in your toolbox. Click a couple and watch your Toolbox. You'll see the tool appear or disappear. This is nice to remove tools you'll never use. You can also change the order of the tools by selecting the tool in the Tools dialog box and dragging it up or down. A little line will show you where you're putting the tool in relation to the other tools. Give this a try and watch your toolbox. You can immediately see that the tool order changes. So go through the tools and choose which ones you prefer. I'd recommend: Rectangle Select, Ellipse Select, Free Select, Fuzzy Select, Scissors, Color Picker, Zoom, Measure, Move, Align, Crop, Rotate, Scale, Flip, Text, Bucket Fill, Blend, Eraser, Clone, Dodge/Burn. We won't use some of these options, but these are the tools that I might use when creating a scroll saw pattern. There are other tools you might want to turn on, namely the color manipulation tools. I don't have them turned on. I'll use the menu at the top of the screen instead. But feel free to turn those on if you want easy access. Navigating The Image We'll be zooming in and out of the image all of the time. So we'll need to find an easy way to navigate the image. There are a number of ways to do this. You can find the option that works best for you. Zooming in and out can be easily be done with the + and - keys. You can use the number pad + and - keys or the ones on the keyboard (remember, the plus on the keyboard is Shift and =). You can also use the magnifying glass in the toolbar. Drag a box around what you want to zoom in, or just click to zoom in incrementally. Holding the Ctrl and clicking will zoom out. You can also use the zoom pull-down menu on the bottom of the screen. I personally like using the roller wheel on my mouse. Ctrl+mouse wheel will either zoom in (roll-up) or out (roll down). Panning can be done with the scroll bars at the bottom and right of the image. Just drag those around and you'll easily pan the image. The dotted box in the lower right corner will also help you pan the image (see Main Screen section above). Hovering your mouse over the image and pressing the space bar will allow you to pan the image while dragging the mouse. You can use the roller wheel to pan the image up and down. Holding the shift button while using the mouse wheel will pan the image left and right. The method I prefer is using the button on the mouse roller wheel to pan around the image. Just click the button, then drag the mouse to pan the image. Keyboard Shortcuts Keyboard shortcuts will make your life much easier and the pattern-making process goes that much quicker. It is much easier to type 'P' to get the paintbrush as opposed to moving over to the toolbox and selecting the icon. We'll be working with black and white, so to switch the foreground color with the background color (black and white), we hit the 'X' key. That way we can paint the black areas then hit 'X' to switch from black to white and paint in the white areas. In the tool palette, you can hover over an icon to get a tooltip. A the end of the tool-tip, you'll find the shortcut key in bold. Hover over the paintbrush tool and you'll notice that the letter 'P' is the shortcut key. Hover over the other tools. What shortcut keys do you see? In the menu, you'll also see shortcut keys assigned to various functions. The shortcut is on the right of the option. For example, look in the Select menu. Next to None you'll see the shortcut as Shift+Ctrl+A. Pressing this combination of keys will deselect your mask from the image. You can create custom shortcut keys too. Go to Edit>Keyboard Shortcuts. This will pop up a dialog box that has all of the options within GIMP. Find the function you wish to assign. When you want to assign the shortcut, just click the shortcut column next to the function. Then press your combination of keys. If the combination of keys isn't used by any other function, your shortcut key will automatically be saved. If the shortcut keys you chose are being used by another function, it will pop up a warning message asking if you want to reassign the shortcut. You can say yes, or decide to select a different combination of keys. Customizing your shortcut keys is a very powerful option. I like to have my shortcut keys within reach of my left hand so I can switch between tools/functions with my left hand and still control the mouse with my right hand. This works well for me. Create a work area that works well for you. One last note. If you right-click on various icons or on the image itself, it often pops up additional options for that tool or section of the program. Assignments: Browse through the menu options and tool options. Customize your toolbox and dialog boxes. Look at the shortcut keys. Reassign them if you prefer. Practice navigating through an image. The better you get at it, the quicker you can work. I'm sure you have plenty of questions. Just fire away and I'll do my best to expand on some of these concepts. We're getting there! Next lesson we'll be importing our pictures and setting up our work area. Then we're off to the real pattern-making.

Welcome to lesson 2. In this lesson, we're going to cover three subjects today. The first is different styles of patterns. Then we'll learn what makes a good reference image. Then we finish off the discussion with the wonderful world of copyrights. Pattern Styles There is a wide variety of styles and each artist chooses their own approach to pattern designing. But if we break it down to very basic styles, I think we might be able to hone it down to 4 basic categories; line art, silhouette, impressionistic, and shadowed. Line Art: Line art basically consists of straight or curved lines to indicate form and outline. We normally think of line art as a drawing where the artist will draw lines to indicate the features of the subject. Line art rarely has texture, shading, or color. When translating line art into a pattern, you must pay attention to continuous lines. Often line art will have outlines and long, connecting lines. This poses a problem for scrollers because we rely on patterns that allow small sections to be supported by the wood. Otherwise, when you cut a continuous line, your design will fall apart. You'll have to find natural breaks within the line to create a bridge that will support each of the sections. Two approaches to dealing with line art is to approach the lines with either veining or thickening up the line. Some will treat the lines as a form of veining. Veining is when you use the width of the blade (kerf) to create the lines. This results in very thin and delicate lines. Since veining produces very thin lines, it is often used as an accent for another pattern style (ie, silhouette). Another way is to thicken the line so it becomes more prominent in the design. This will produce very nice shadow lines which a person can see from a distance. The line is treated as a shape when cutting with a scroll saw. Lines could be irregular with lots of variation of width through the stroke. It could be tightly controlled where the line thickness remains consistent throughout the stroke with a squared-off ends. Or it can be a calligraphy style where the line tapers to a point at the end of the stroke. Here are a couple of examples of line art: Silhouette A silhouette is an outline of a subject matter without any interior details. Imagine a person on the horizon. You can see their outline, but not their features. You'd be surprised how many things you can recognize with just a silhouette. As such, silhouettes are popular for pattern making. Not only can you do a traditional silhouette profile, but you can also use silhouettes in other scroll saw projects. Often these are used as decorative accents to a functional item, but they can be used as stand-alone designs. When using a silhouette, the trick is to get the right angle so you can see enough of the contour to recognize the subject. A 3/4 view of a car may not be as effective as a profile view of a car where you'd be able to recognize the make and model. Here are a few examples of silhouettes: Impressionistic/Pointillism The impressionistic or pointillism approach is another popular method of creating scroll saw patterns. This uses many small piercing cuts that make up the picture. This style reminds me of the works of Monet where he would use very small brushstrokes to create his painting. When you're close to the image, it looks like small dabs of paint or dots. But when you step back and look from a distance, the painting comes together to form a picture. This is much the same with this style of scroll saw pattern. When you're looking close, it looks like a random assortment of holes in some wood. It's when you step back is when the picture comes together. This style is impressive by the sheer number of piercing cuts, sometimes running into the thousands. It is very time-consuming to cut as it requires a lot of pilot holes to be drilled, and blades threaded. It could be argued that this style is easier to design as it doesn't rely on bridging of sections. But in order to do it effectively takes much practice. Here are a few examples of Impressionistic patterns: Shadowed The last style I'd like to mention is the shadowed style. I think this might be the most common form of portrait patterns as it conveys a lot of depth and detail. This style relies on emphasizing the shadows on the subject. The shape of the shadows usually indicates detail. This style can be a bit tricky as it takes a lot of judgment calls due to the varying degrees of shadow. For example, the area under the chin might have a heavy shadow, whereas the lines on the forehead has a light shadow. As an artist, you have to decide if you'll treat those shadows the same. Remember, we're only working in black and white. The nice thing about working in this style, however, is we can use our software filters to help us decide which shadows are important. We can build our pattern from the base pattern into something cut able. This will be the style that we'll be focusing on in this class. Here are some examples of shadowed portraits: Hybrids As I said at the beginning of this lesson, many artists will combine many of these styles to create a portrait. The Einstien portrait below uses both line art and shadowed styles. The Stones characature uses both line art and shadowed style with a touch of impressionism. The Monroe picture is mostly line-art (most veining and some thick lines) with shadow accents. The Military picture is mostly impressionism with a hint toward line art with some shadow accents. The bird clock is a silhouette with shadow accents. And lastly, the cat is shadowed with impressionistic details. Reference Material As scrollers, we often rely on reference material to create our patterns. This may come from a variety of sources. But since we're making portrait patterns, our reference material would typically come in the form of photographs. So what makes a good photograph? Maybe it's easier to talk about what doesn't make a good photograph to better understand what does make a good photograph. Small Photos Last lesson we talked about resolution. Resolution indicates how many pixels make up the photograph. The more pixels a photo has, the more information and detail it contains. If we use a small photo and enlarge the it, we're only spreading that small amount of information it has over a larger area. We do not gain additional information. So the larger the photograph, the more information it contains. The more information it contains, the more detail we can pull from the photo and put into our patterns. Often the file size is a good indicator of how much information it contains. A file of 8k is very small. Standard digital cameras will take pictures from 1meg (1000k) to 12 megs (12,000k). My camera takes pictures of about 1.2 megs which is more then enough to pull a pattern from. I used the Cher thumbnail picture in the video to demonstrate enlarging small pictures into larger areas. Grainy/Blurry Photos Grainy photographs present the same problems small photos do. Blurry or grainy photos may have enough data in the file, but all of the details are blurred. We're not able to pull detail from that file since no detail really exists. Creating a pattern from a grainy/blurry photo would require a lot of interpretation and "faking it." It can be done if additional reference material is available and you have plenty of anatomy knowledge. But for the most part, unless your a professional artist, grainy and blurry photos are useless. You may run into grainy photos with action shots (sports), or in low-light situations. I used a photo of Bigfoot as an example of a grainy/blurry photo in the demonstration video. Low Light Pictures taken in low light, especially with digital cameras, can cause a lot of problems. Often, in low-light situations, the photo comes out grainy. This is caused by the camera trying to recognize what it's trying to photograph. It will use its internal programming to equalize the levels of the picture. This will often boost certain colors, increase highlights, and wash out shadows. Basically, it tries to guess what is in the picture. Poorly I might add. Even if the camera does not interpret the picture, it would capture very little information because color and light get lost in the shadows. If the data is not recorded, there is no way to pull additional information from the photograph. While low-light photos are not ideal, not all is lost. You may be able to fix the photograph with your software to the point where you can pull the detail you need from the photograph. However, it really depends on the picture quality. So results may vary. I used an indoor snapshot of John Goodman for the example in the demonstration video. Notice that the highlights on his face are exaggerated by the flash, whereas the background and black colors are lost in the shadows. Also notice the grainy texture cause by low light photography. However, with a little creativity, we'd still be able to pull a pattern from this photograph. Good Photographs A good photograph is a file that has a good resolution (large file). It isn't grainy, nor blurry and the light levels work well. Good lighting may include heavy shadows, but the difference is that you can still see the details. Good levels would have dark blacks, and bright whites, with a nice gradation between the two extremes. We want to be able to see shadows and highlights equally as well. I have two more examples of John Goodman that would make a good photograph. The first is a nice even light across his face. Notice you can still see shadows across his face. The second has heavier shadows and highlights, but they still work well because it has a nice color balance. Details are not lost in the shadows or the highlights. We all know what a good photograph looks like. As long as the photo itself looks good enough to put into a frame, chances are it's good enough to pull a pattern from. Clipart Clipart is really hit and miss. Color clipart doesn't typically have much depth. Since we play with shadows and highlights to create our scroll saw portraits, it would take a lot of creativity to make color clipart work. Black and White clipart usually works better since they too work with shadows and highlights. With a little tweaking, black and white clipart can easily be converted to a scroll saw pattern. Printed Material Pictures from magazines and newspapers present their own challenges. Not because of picture quality, but rather how they are printed. If you take out a magnifying glass and take a look at a picture, you'll notice it is made up of tiny little dots. Since there are no hard lines, it gets a little tricky to create your base pattern. It can be done with a blur filter to blur those dots into each other before applying other filters. It takes a little fiddling around, but eventually, you'll get it. I used this webpage from Teacher's Lab to demonstrate in the video how magazine photos are printed. Copyrights OK. Let's talk about the dreaded subject of copyrights. There is a common misconception that you can take any work, change it, and call it your own. This is completely wrong. This is what's called derivative work and is a violation of copyright law. Taking Andy Worhol's Marylin Monroe painting and turning it into a scroll saw pattern is derivative work. Andy Worhol owns that imagery and you're capitalizing on his work and intellectual property. Likewise, if you created a scroll saw pattern and somebody uses that pattern to create a painting, they would be in violation of your rights. Another misconception about copyrights is that it needs to be registered with the copyright office to be protected. This is not true. As soon as a creative work is created, you own the copyright. The benifit of registering it with the copyright office is that it becomes easier to prove in court the creation date and nature of the artistic work. One last warning. Don't think that just because you're a small guy, you won't get picked on by some nasty lawyers. There have been several instances of scroll saw artists getting into a lot of trouble by using images they didn't have permission to use. This is important to keep in mind. We need to respect the rights of our fellow artists. No matter which medium they work in. Here are a few areas of copyright that will interest you. Your Photographs Obviously, this is the safest route to take. If you took a picture of a tiger at the zoo, you're more than within your rights to create a pattern from that photograph since you own the copyright. It becomes a gray area when dealing with celebrities or people who do not give your permission to take their photo, however. Photographs of other works of art will also pose problems. Public Domain Public domain refers to intellectual property that isn't owned by anyone. Therefore, you may use these materials in any way you see fit. There are a few ways these materials enter into the public domain. First, the artist specifically releases it into the public domain. Second, a copyright expires. Works are copyrighted for a period of time, after which it is released into the public domain. You can use images of the Mona Lisa because the painting was created in 1503. The copyright has long but expired. And third, many government-run agencies have all of their images in the public domain since it was obtained with taxpayer monies. These include the Library of Congress, NASA, and US Fish & Wildlife. Creative Commons Creative Commons is an organization that encourages the distribution of creative works for others to build and expand upon. Their license defines which rights the original artist chooses to wave and which rights the artist chooses to retain. Most of these licenses are very generous and allow other artists to expand them. However, you should check to see how the image is licensed as there are several different license options. Royalty-Free Royalty-Free is a confusing term because most assume these images are free. In fact, they are not. Royalty-free means that you pay a licensing fee to use these images in any way you wish without paying future royalties. Assignment Look through our Pattern Library or pattern archives from other scroll saw communities and look at how other artists approach portrait patterns. What are their styles? How do they differ from other patterns? Which pattern styles do you gravitate to (not just subject matter)? Find which style suits you the best. If you would like to create a portrait pattern from one of your own photographs to do alongside the class, you can start looking now. Remember to keep in mind what makes a good picture and choose your picture wisely. It will save you a lot of headaches later. Discussion: Do you know of any other basic category that we can define? What else should we look at when looking for a good picture? What other reference material could we use? What copyright concerns do you have?