Vector Designs part 1

Hi.

I have been wanting to do a review of designs on the market from either Design books such as Dover Pictura electronic art or Dover CD Rom books and Stand alone cd's for a while and have amassed a bit of a collection to try and evaluate what is out there.

Of course designs on disk are a relatively new thing and before them we had design books of which I used to have a lot of, unfortunately these went, along with a lot of designs around 4 years ago on Ebay but I do have a few older books that I bought in the 90's and must have been overlooked during my purge.

These books are still relevant and the designs can be traced directly onto the resist using carbon paper, unfortunately this tracing technique does not allow for the re-sizing of the design. I can remember using scaling paper which has lots of little and larger squares where you enlarge or shrink your design by hand drawing your image from the size it is in one box to the other bigger or smaller.

Courtesy of Wikihow

Of course it is far easier these days to just scan your image either onto you desktop and import into a program for vectorising and some cutting programs have an Acquire feature which will pickup directly from your scanner with both ways working equally well. If you do not have a cutting machine but still require the resizing of the image then either use PAINT and it's re-size function or one of the free programs we have discussed such as INKSCAPE or GIMP to do it for you, then just print off and hand cut.

The images from the different scanning come out quite well.

This rose from the Norm Dobbins book was scanned to the desktop and imported into my program.

It was then vectored.

On a closeup

You can see the lines are very jagged and will require a lots of smoothing.

The Robert Bush book was scanned directly to my program using the Acquire tool.

I then vectored.

The lines are a lot smoother and don't require as much cleanup work.

Of course it could all be down to the scanning so a bit of experimenting to get the best out of the scanning and the vectoring.

Since book designs have gone a bit out of fashion, electronic clipart seems to have moved in; unfortunately the quality of the work can be extremely bad and hours of work can be spent trying to clean up very badly done vectoring.

Off course with all thing there are exceptions and one of the best vector design discs I have is unfortunately one I very rarely use.

The work on this is perfect and can be sent directly to your machine.

If only the rest were as good.

And surprise surprise what you may think would be rubbish turn out very nice indeed.

This is one of the logo discs sold on Ebay with a few thousand images on, I bought it mostly for the football teams and for the few pounds it cost it was well worth it, I have a few of these and have just sent off for another with 8000 images on hoping that a few different teams may be on.

These disks are generally indexed so you can see what you have, I have mentioned in the past about the difficulty in viewing EPS and SVG files through normal means and that a special viewer is needed which can be downloaded so having them in a disc library is a whole lot easier.

This is my local team and I have etched it a number of times in the past both in glass and porcelain, with the quality of these designs it makes it so much easier.

No cleanup required, just size and send to the machine and it is the same with all of the designs on the disc.

By keeping a lookout on Ebay a lot of varied discs popup from time to time and an artist to look out for is one Russ Billington, I have a couple of discs by him which I bought around 2008 but unfortunately have never seen again and the website shown on the disc is no longer open.

The artwork vectorising on these discs is mostly good but I have found some that require a little work to be usable.

The images on the discs also have a viewing library to select your design, this is one I used many years ago as a deep etch practise piece and I still have it.

No need to do much work here.

and the etched article, still need to colour.

The Russ Billington Oriental also has some quality work on it with very good vector images.

A varied selection with this especially good crane

Searching Ebay also gave up this strange find.

It is a Bibliography of ancient Greek designs found on the temples and ancient buildings all done in EPS format.

It even comes with a booklet explaining the history of each design, of course I assume that's what the reference book says as it all Greek to me.

I have copied all of the designs into my program for easy selection, which I plan to do with a lot of my designs for easy access.

Unfortunately the vectoring requires a bit of work on a lot of them to be able to cut.

You can see with the circles overlapping that these need welding together, other than that this is a very good design.

One particular request I had around 6 years ago was for the MARTIN family crest on 500mm x 500mm porcelain tile, after a extensive search on the web I was unable to find the right crest. They was a lot of business out there wanting to sell me a what was purported to be the correct crest but they where all just made up and cost a lot for one download.
I eventually came across a Canadian company called ARMORIAL GOLD who specialise in coats of arms and bought there disc's.

It came as a 2 disc set for Coral and Windows and hold probably every crest and coat of arms of every family in the world (that has a coat of arms).

The cost was reasonable if I remember at around £60 but as I only charged around £40 for the job it was more of an investment.
The designs are perfect and fully vectorised

but unfortunately they are meant to be printed as is and not designed for a cutting machine.

It took a whole bunch of hours to clean up the design ready for cutting.

A lot of it is very good but the emblishments have been brought to the front of the design and took a lot to clean.

The upside is that you certainly learn how to use the tools of your program.

I even learnt a bit of Latin.

So even with the best designs a lot of work may be involved and your sources can be everywhere on the web, as long as you learn to use your tools to clean up a vector you can use most anything.

Another source that may be overlooked are Tattoo designs, these come in the mundane to the most exotic, mostly these are in jpg. format and will need vectorising but vector designs are available and we shall look at these later.

Buying artwork to down load can be a very expensive thing to do and the couple of times I have tried I have been stung with high costs which delivered a jpg. instead of a vector, saying that there are a couple of good honest sites
One site I liked and used was Digital-Clipart

I downloaded there set of Ancient masks.

This may seem an unusual thing to etch but I was into trying out strange design hence my logo at the page header, that came from a simple sketch I saw on the internet around 5 years ago and I worked it up to a vector for practise and deep carved it.
I also did a lot of these masks, only 3 left.

Even the strange can look good, well to me anyway.

I shall look into converting a downloaded design into something usable in a later blog as my next will be a bit of a Design book review.

Paul

Cups & Glasses

Hi

Been home for a few weeks now and have been rather busy designing and etching for people.

I did mention a while ago that you may tend to fall into one type of etching and even if it was not your plan to stick solely to that way of doing it then that type seems to take over as it is either what you find you are good at or more than likely it's what people want you to make for them. Well at the moment I seem to have fallen into the glass etching and cup etching, I am used to doing large pieces and was wanting to develop the coloured pieces of which I am having limited success but it seems that people like my cups and glasses.

So in the hope of this developing a little more than just for friends I have a bought in a little stock from an outlet I found, just a couple of dozen pint glasses which etch nicely and 10 ounce cups which I can buy inexpensively anywhere, along with packaging boxes.

I also took the liberty of buying a few hundred business cards, who knows it may drum up some business.

The pint pots have been mostly for an athletics club in Bideford, Devon which is in the south west of the UK, and the club specialises in rowing.

I was asked to make the first for my boss's sons birthday as a present from his sister.

I made it in the normal way by downloading the club logo and vectoring it.

Unfortunately the lettering didn't come out so I used the circle writing tool and after a bit of fiddling got it approx with the nearest font I could find.

Just a word on fonts.

EBay is full of fonts for sale you can get disks with thousands on for a few pounds so try to find a reputable seller and buy a disk, I have had in the distant past, requests for an obscure font that I found looking through my disks; no idea how the person I was making the job new about it but luckily I was able to supply.

You may also have to download a font viewer as six thousand fonts in alphabetical format takes a bit of searching through.

Once the design was made and all of the writing I sent it to my cutting machine and weeded the resist.

I marked the two sides of the glass and applied the resist.

Once fully masked I gave it a light blasting to surface etch the glass.

I also had a second commission going at the same time and that was for a retirement gift for the ships Chief Officer so made the two together, with his I vectored my companies logo MPI.

Bit difficult to photograph.

This then created a little more interest.

Also for the Bideford Athletic club but for Geoff.

Which led onto a glass for Alan who requested his local Masons Lodge logo.

Which led onto a glass the the club President.

So I have been a little busy, did not stop there.

I was asked for a cup and glass for a friends daughter who is a champion swimmer so her club logo got the same treatment.

Again I had to search for a suitable font but found a close match after a trawl around.

The cup work has really taken off, and my next commission was a paying job which kind of backfired as I was given the wrong information to apply to the cups so am making new ones for free.

Unfortunately the dog is not a Labradoodle but a Cockerpoo which kind of ruined the surprise hence the new ones.

My new project is a kind of caricature theme of the people I work with, being avid readers of the VIZ comic a list was made of which person was most like their VIZ character and I have started making them there own cup.

Those of you who don't know VIZ, it can best best be described as a rather rude adult comic which is a big hit around the world not just in the UK.

Anyway I have made a start and some of them can't be put on these pages as they are rather rude.

They all have the VIZ logo saying who's cup it is and the character.

This is for the Second Mate who is a Londoner and a bit of a cock.

For the ETO who is a bit self opinionated and also a cock.

This for the Chief Engineer, who is rather portly, (he suggested this)

This for one of the 3rd Engineers, well it speaks for itself.

For the other 3rd and this defiantly speaks for itself.

The other ETO was a little difficult as his character didn't have any pictures that could be vectorised so with him being Scottish I decided on a BROONS character, a lot more sedate than the VIZ but a Scottish tradition.

So rather busy this time home and will start again tomorrow.

Paul