Materials Tools & Equipment: Part 3 Designs & Software

Hi

We are very lucky in this day and age that even the least artistic among us (me) can turn out the most amazing work and it can all be down to computers and the Internet. Of course, we have some very talented artists out there who don't rely on aids to assist in their endeavours and it's all the more pleasing to see their work; but I bet they sometimes cheat and have a little bit of computerised assist.

Finding quality imagery is not difficult as everybody out there wants us to view, download, copy or buy their work, publishing companies print a whole host of books with the most beautiful designs. EBay is full of offers for digital media selling you the logos of every company in the world and Cd's full of images and fonts are available in their thousands.

The problem is not finding images to work with, it's finding the right images to work with.

A lot of design images out there are someone's intellectual property and as such are subject to some form of copyright, to make you aware of this I have linked a page below to explain the rules of copyright.

Royalty free work is also widely available for all to use but also has it's limitation's on work for sale.

 Copyright and Royalty Free explained

You will generally have an idea in mind for your design and start collecting these types of images, but first a word of advice Keep them safe. I had years of designs on an external hard drive nice and safe or so I thought, I then plugged the external drive into my new iMac to use as the mac backup device thinking it would just use part of the drive. No! it wiped the drive to use it solely for itself, greedy apple. Anyway all gone, just a few I had on flash drives but years of converting to vectors lost. Be warned
I even lost the design of my favourite self portrait, one of my first deep work, bit ugly but had as screen saver for many a year

Images from colouring books are widely available and you can get great ideas from these, just this morning in the supermarket I came across a colouring book called Zen which had some marvellous designs, so don't be put off because these are designed for children. 

Of course, please remember the above advice on copyright, no more said.

Understanding Images

Images can be downloaded free to use from many sites out there, just type in free designs and you will get hundreds but you really need to know what type of design you can work with before you download.

Downloaded designs are rarely the size you want, you will mostly have to enlarge them as opposed to shrinking to fit and this is where your problems will start. 

The ordinary images you search for to download are in a format called a Raster or Bitmap, these can have a number of extensions such as .bmp .jpg .png .gif or .tif with .jpg and .png being the most common and as such are ideal for viewing and printing but pretty useless for working with. The problem is that these images are made up of dots on a grid pattern and as you try to enlarge the design the grid and the dots enlarge giving you an out of focus image.

For a better understanding of extensions have a read from Scantips extension basics

So instead of a clear image you end up with fuzziness which if you are just printing off to trace around then no problems but if you want a distinct design either for complex tracing or as a lot of people do; send to a cutting machine, then a different format of design is required.

The preferred format is categorised as a Vector image, images in a vector format are made up of paths in the form of lines, curves and angles, they have start and stop points and are fully scalable to any size you require without loss of definition.
Vector file extension's are .svg and .eps so if you see these extensions on the end of a download file then you have a vector drawing.

SVG; stands for Scalable Vector Graphics and are my preferred format to look for, the other extension is.
EPS; which stands for Encapsulated Postscript and is the second preferred choice for me, although I have found it to be the most common.

I have found the best source of designs out there comes from a publisher called Dover, they have some excellent designers and produce books with the designs printed in both black outline and colour with a cd of the designs in a number of formats, .eps and .svg being the ones we want.

They can be found on eBay so keep an eye out as you may grab a bargain but first look at my blog page titled Dover to find what's good and bad.

You can find the whole library at Dover Books

These are great to start a collection of designs in a royalty free vector format, my favourite  books are the Celtic and Art Nouveau from a designer called Allen Weller.

Designs can also be downloaded free and the link for Craftsmans Space should give you some great designs.

The web is full of paid for designs which I have looked at and even bought but a word of warning they are expensive and as happened to me you sometimes don't get what you paid for. With these sites you are required to buy credits to pay for your design, click what you want and down it comes, except my £12 for 2 vector designs came out as .jpg which were totally useless and too complex to convert. So beware.

Not all download sites are like this one and a good one I used to use is Digital - Clipart lots of designs to choose from.

Having these designs is one thing viewing and using them is another, this is where the software comes in. Dover books come with a viewer on the cd so as to look at what you want but to use them a program is necessary and there are a lot of free viewers and design programs out there.
The problem with vector files is viewing them as previews so software like Irfan or Mystic Thumbs may be for you as they will group your whole collection to pick from.
Another good viewer for single images is EPS  Viewer

A lot of people have their preferred program to use and the best are Coral draw and Adobe Illustrator these are both paid for programs and can cost a great deal of money, but both of these have the ability to send the finished work to a cutting machine. For us beginner's a more modest, free program is readily available and this is Inkscape.

I have never used this before having a program supplied with my old GCC cutter called Signpal which is a version of Flexisign, and because my cutter was (back then) top of the range the program was the high-end edition with everything I needed. A top version of Flexisign now costs over £3000.

I now have Signgo pro for my new machine and am still learning its capabilities, the machine is normally supplied with Signgo lite 

but the company selling advertised it with the pro version, by mistake as it turned out. The Lite program is not expensive to buy at £82 but the machine was only £25 dearer than what I had negotiated with another company with the lite included which made me think it was a bargain for the pro version;

Don't think they were too happy when I called and asked why I had lite and not pro, anyway the pro arrived next day by recorded delivery and no profit on that sale as it cost way more than the lite.

Why do you need a program like Inkscape.

Firstly any image you have in either, .svg or .eps format will be the size it is, not the size you want it to be, you may wish to have multiple copies of this design in your artwork or you may wish to have different elements to make up your design or you may want to design your own artwork, I can go on; no, well basically it's indispensable.

I often find that the vectorization supplied in these discs or downloads are at times a little basic, curves out of shape or lines to close together, with Inkscape you can alter all of these defects by adjusting the nodes on the paths.

I have linked a group of training clips from You tube so you can get an idea of how to go about using Inkscape, after only a couple of days practising with Inkscape I have found it amazing and for a free program it is loaded with ability.

There is one major problem I have noticed with Inkscape and that is it does not import .eps format images, there is a way around this and I have linked it under Inkscape tuition, but I have found an easy way that is by converting the image to .svg and importing this saved image.

So that problem solved.

The really indispensable part of these type of programs is the trace function and Inkscape has a top trace feature.
Tracing is basically the ability to take a bitmap image and convert it to a vector, you can then make up your design and use this image in a cutting machine or print for tracing and hand cutting.
I have spent some time looking through the videos and found it very easy to use, I am quite used to vector conversion with having to do lots over the years, this program was a little different to what I am used to but no problem.

I started by pulling an image from a search onto the desktop, then picking it up and placing into Inkscape.

Next go to Path and click Trace Bitmap, use Brightness cuttoff and change the threshhold to over .5, this picks out more of the design.

Click Ok to start the vectorization.

Go back to your image and pick up the top layer, this is the vector.

You can now delete the bitmap image, and to keep the ratio before any sizing click the padlock button.

You now have a vector, to check the paths (lines) are nice and smooth you can remove the fill and have a nice line image.
Highlight the image by clicking on it, then go to Object and click Fill & Stroke, firstly click on to the Stroke paint box and click the darkest box next to the X then go to the Fill box and click the X button. Your image should now look like this.

This is a wireframe of your design and any manipulation can be done in this form but first you need to activate the nodes by clicking on the 2nd button down on the side bar and you will get.

You can zoom into any area and check and manipulate the paths to any shape you want.

Have a look at the tuition videos and you will soon get the hang of it.

These images can be saved as .svg and opened in your cutting machine program, most of these programs have a vector facility so you can work on them there to make up whatever design you wish.

Paul