Sean Piotrowski

This is another entry into my 365 requests sub-project, in which I’ve asked friends to submit images, ideas, and more for inclusion in 365Sketches. Sean gave me an image at my request before this project started, but it certainly worked for this purpose. I took his image, did a bitmap trace, and played with the settings to capture the most significant identifying features. I took a rectangle and put it in the background, then applied a multi-stop gradient with lots of what I think of as his skin tones. I then created a spirograph using the filter/render/spirograph tool and masked it with a duplicate of the botmap conversion to allow his face to appear clear, but the background to have a subtle, but I think interesting pattern. I thank Sean for his willingness to participate and hope he finds the image a good use of the share.

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Mayor of Epic

This is my first entry into 365 requests, an open call for portrait, illustration, and light logo requests from friends who’d like to participate in this project. This entry was a photo from my friend Dennis O’ Brien, who happens to be the current Mayor of Newtown Township in Pennsylvania. I love working with him in any case, but I’m glad he answered my call for raw material for the 365sketches blog project. I started with his photo in which he was wearing a viking helmet and braids, obviously a fun photo where he was performing opera. I decided to run with the horns theme, and give him horns of his very own. I got a CC licensed image at Flickr from Ben Pollard (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ben_pollard/2343700094/)  and did some conversions to vector, some surgery to nodes, and some fine tuning with the eraser and calligraphy tools in Inkscape. It helps that Horns are Epic, but so is Dennis.

Robot searching for love

I really love how this one turned out. I started by looking in the MorgueFile directory for inspiration and came across this killer set of robot images that were being featured. I really loved the one i used as the basis of this piece at http://morguefile.com/archive/display/645792 by Seemann. I took the original image, bitmap-traced it twice, once in edge mode, once in threshold mode, and made the edge bright yellow and the threshold deep dark umber. I then duplicated and filled the threshold image with bright yellow, sent it to the back, and blurred for a glow effect. I used the ellipse tool to make the thought cloud, and did a union to bring together the cloud itself. The heart was made with the ellipse and Bezier tools, and unioned. Then I duplicated, intersected, and path-inset to make the gradient reflection on the heart. The background is just a subtle mix of earthy tones. I had a hell of a lot of fun making this one, I hope you enjoy it.

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Self portrait with scowl

I opened up PhotoBooth on my MBP, and took a quick close up shot of my face in a scowl. I brought it into Inkscape, converted the bitmap into a vector with both the edge detect and the threshold methods, then applied different colors to each and overlapped them. I added a background for the highlight, and finally added some plain black lines to emphasize my mouth and eyes, as they were getting a bit lost.

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Jay Z

I decided that enough people are telling me that they are digging the gradient based bitmap to vector translations that I want to work more often on them. Plus, my most popular posts so far (by far) are those of famous people, icons, or objects. In this sketch, I used Inkscape to take an image of Jay Z and convert it to vector, apply gradients to it, and to a rectangle based background. I then took three rectangles, converted to paths, and brought the opacity down. I’ve seen this kind of triple overlay imagery in several images related to his new album, The Blueprint 3, which I’m enjoying quite a bit. I especially like On To The Next One (feat. Swizz Beatz). I decided to twist the rectangles in space using the node tool to add some depth. If you’re interested in Jay Z and his latest album, you might be interested in seeing another direction it could have gone with the help of a producer named Alex Goose who developed http://www.theblueprint3outtakes.com/.

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White washed face

This design, with help from Sarah Klockars-Clauser (photo © Sarah Klockars-Clauser for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike) was done by using the technique in the following screencast , the first ever on 365sketches. It makes use of the Trace Bitmap tool, the gradient tool, and the import function. Enjoy!

If the image is too small, visit the full sized video at http://screencastle.com/watch/5cde58f3a62104ea992b96bba3f1d2e6

Happy cyclops

Pushing my quota for absurdity in this series, I decided to use Inkscape today in order to do some collage work. By taking three images from MorgueFile.com (a little girl looking over a wall, a made-up eye, and a mouth full of braces) and bitmap tracing them, I was able to make this happy little cyclops. The most work was done to remove the nodes from the originals in order to make way for the layering of the new elements, such as taking out the original face of the little girl. I masked off part of the mouth with braces, to get rid of the hard edges from the original photo.

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Lady Sphinx

Today’s post is a sphinx like creature, a tiger with the head of a woman. It was simple enough to do in Inkscape. I pulled a public domain photo of both the woman and the tiger from The Commons on Flickr. Then in Inkscape, I imported and bitmap-traced both of them, placed them on top of each other with a strategically placed white polygon between the face and the tiger to create cover for the still-present Tiger’s face. Then, I added a solid color to the face and a gradient blend to the tiger and wall, which ends up looking like foliage when it’s green.

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Woman enjoying coffee from a teacup

Using a CC licensed image from OpenPhoto.net (photo © pinar for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike) I put together this image of a woman enjoying coffee from a teacup. I started by finding the woman’s face on OpenPhoto, which I imported into Inkscape, bitmap-traced and then edited down. Then, I added a path and sculpted it into a coffee cup. Then, using the pencil tool set to shape: ellipse, I made some steamy translucent wisps. Then, I added the letters on the cup, converted to path, combined, and bent with the LPE: bend. I put gradients just about everywhere: face, cup, text, background.

Angry Monkey

This one was simpler than many others on this site — I went and found a striking image of a monkey, I used the trace bitmap tool in order to convert the raster image into paths, and then I created a gradient fill from red to black for the path. Straightforward, but I think it’s quite nice.

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You are probably wondering why you would want to know how to do this. Well, I’ll tell you, if you have a Cricut and SCAL software you will be able to cut it, that’s why! I found a cute bunny pattern over at familyfun.com and cut it with my cricut to make this cute card:

Learn to make this card with your cricut.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a cricut, you can print out the pattern, cut out the bunny and trace it on a folded sheet of cardstock and cut it out to make your card that way. But if you have a cricut this is a good trick to know because so many patterns are available for free in pdf format!

You will need a cricut machine, Sure Cuts a Lot software (SCAL) and a free program called Inkscape for this tutorial.

Step 1. Go here to find the bunny pattern, click the image so you can see it full size, it is on page 2 of the pdf file. Zoom in on the right hand bunny and press the “print screen” key on your keyboard.

zoom in on the little bunny and press the "print screen" key (top row on the computer keyboard.)

Open your image editing software (I use Paint Shop Pro but photoshop is fine too) and go under edit and paste as a new image.

Crop the image so all that you see is one bunny

Use the "magic wand" tool to select the bunny (click inside the bunny). Then under the adjust menu select hue/saturation/lightness.

Desaturate (make black) the bunny.

Now save this file as bunny.jpg. Open Inkscape and open the bunny.jpg, choose the arrow on the top of  left hand tool bar. click on the bunny, you will see a box with arrows at the corners and on the sides of the box around the bunny.

Go under the path menu and choose "trace bitmap"

After you click "tace bitmap" click update and the screen will look like this. Click OK.

Save the file.

*Note: If the pattern you are converting is low quality or hand drawn go under path again and choose “simplify”. That will smooth out any bumps and give you a quick, clean cut. This pattern was so clean that I did not have to do this. Using the simplify function can distort your image a bit so only use it on low quality (pixalated) or hand drawn images.

It will automatically save the file as an svg file.

Now you have converted a pfd file into an svg! This method will work with anything you can see on your screen so if you make a design in another program you can convert that too! How fun!

This is how to get this file into SCAL so you can cut it with your cricut. Open scal, under file choose import svg, then select you file and open it! Easy peasy!

The file is imported, to make the card copy and paste the bunny. Flip one of the bunnies and make sure you check "weld" for each and link them up at the tails like this and cut.

There you have it. It wasn’t so hard. Now you can cut dang near anything with your cricut. Leave me a comment if you get stuck, I’m happy to help.

Until next time happy crafting!

VectorMagic, el objetivo de esta aplicación es pasar de una imagen mapa de bits a un gráfico vectorial; como es una aplicación web, primero habrá que subir la imagen deseada y luego obtendremos la imagen vectorial lista para descargar.

Además algunos se atreven a decir que puede ser mejor que otras aplicaciones:

Ejemplo 1

Ejemplo 2

Página Oficial:
http://vectormagic.com/
http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/

Visto en:
http://www.codigogeek.com/2007/10/26/
vector-magic-vectoriza-cualquier-imagen/