| this is for making stencils, although you can use it to learn vector from raster images. very useful. |
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get
an image that you want, and i'm going to let you in on a sweet
ass secret: indexstock.com.
register an account with a fake name, and you have access to billions
of high resolution images, albiet they have a watermark on them,
if you use the healing brush (photoshop 7) you can remove them
pretty easily, or just work around them, i do it all the time.
i'm using a toy soldier image just to be hardcore dumb. |
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after
you've got the image the way you want it, before you reduce it
to greyscale, you're going to want to seperate it into lights
and darks, i removed the red because i don't want it to be that
dark (you'll see why) |
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reduce
to greyscale, then go image->adjust->brightness/contrast.
turn contrast to 100, then play with the brightness to get a recognizable
image. |
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yeah, not that complicated so far, but if you're turning it into a stencil, you can't exactly cut around the pixels. this is where you download cr2v. it turns something from pixels into a vector image, which we can make huge without shitty pixels, plus it simplifies the image down into cutable shapes. once you have cr2v, put it in it's own folder, mine is c:\cr2v\. save your image as a .bmp into that directory, mine will be 'c:\cr2v\army.bmp' in your cr2v directory, there is a file named 'default.set', open it with notepad and change it to read this: low_color_threshold
=100 click start->run, and type "cmd" into the run box, and hit ok. you don't need to know dos for this. you'll be at the command prompt, type this: cd\ obviously replace 'army.bmp' with whatever your file name is, and the above commands are assuming cr2v at c:\cr2v\. it just helps. |
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it should spit out some commands and then: -> segmentation got it? ok. now run illustrator and open up "army.ps", which will be in your cr2v directory, boom, you've got a hip little vector image, see mine in ocmparison to the original below (right click, zoom in, it's a flash file), the vector is on the left.
if you don't have illustrator, just open army.ps in photoshop, and enter a high resolution (300 is pretty high). there you go. |
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now how does this help you? it's a vector image, so it can be MASSIVE. don't have access to a printer that can do massive images? here's how, in illustrator. we're pretending we want it to be 30x30 inches, but we only have a printer that can do 8.5x11 file->document setup, change the setting to 30x30 inches scale your armyman (or whatever) to take up as much of that space as you want, like so:
see that little outline in the top left? that's a 8x11 page that illustrator puts in, just so you can see where your page edges will be. if you hit print on the above image, you'd get a peice of paper with the corner of his shoulder. this is the trick. you're going to be moving that little page around and hitting print, so you're printing this bitch off in chunks, where you can later peice it together. you move the page around with the page tool, located in the same button as the hand tool, so click and hold the hand tool, it will slide out.
if you have a printer that can handle bigger, you can change the size of that page tool with file->print setup. |
i trust you can peice together the pages in a logical order, cut off the shit you don't need. you can trace it onto vellum, which you can buy at most paper stores, or staples. it's basically transparent plastic paper, so you can submerge it in spraypaint or cum or whatever, and it's still good. if the vellum is too small, you can peice that shit together too, no problems. use masking tape instead of scotch, as scotch will melt under the spraypaint. further information: stencil revolution |
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