This is my current WIP, still at a fairly early stage. not sure how long i've spent on it so far, less than an evening.

colored all the paths I had before now.

and yes, i know she has no eyebrows....

do you draw each of these paths by hand? are you using any auto trace functions at all?

its looking good BTW, i wish i could draw like this...



thnks for sharing!

Are the gaps intentional, i.e. will they remain? I actually like them. It's a really nice effect - kinda like mosiac, but not

I draw the regions by hand, tis closer to being something artistic then do just trace the regions off the image tho. Its a lot easier since I got a wacom.
I mainly just kinda squint at it to work out where the color wants to be, but you can cheat and take the source into gimp or whatever and reduce the color count down to something like 256 with an optimised pallette. Helps to define the regions visually.

The gaps arent intentional, I tend to be fairly rough and ready to start with, then go back and tweak later. Often I just put a bunch of filler shapes in behind the main shapes to block out the background.

Glad you guys like it, not sure when it'll progress more, I'm going abroad for work tomorrow.

So when you draw by hand, do you use the pencil tool or calligraphy tool. When I use the pencil tool my lines come out very shaky but then I simplyfy the path to smooth it. But you could use a combination of the calligraphy tool and paint bucket to get a more controled shape.

I'm hoping in future the developers will include a mass option for the pencil tool, or allow paths to be drawn with the calligraphy tool.

I just use the pencil tool. I dont tend to have a problem with shape of them with my wacom. ( I did the first couple of images in my DA gallery with a mouse which was harder)

Mostly I draw a whole bunch of regions like in the first image, then spend a while doing color picker, spacebar, select next, spacebar, pick color, spacebar etc.

quite often refine areas as I do this when I'm not happy with the effect.

In terms of paths being drawn with the callig, I could get it to do that in a couple of hours, had got it drawing centerline shapes and grouping them with the fill color applied to generate filled shapes just before bulia added the woodcut effect code. His stuff screwed by diff up big time, and I've not gone back to try integrate it post his patch. Needed the UI coding up for it too.

still playing with this one...

This is coming along really nice. I can't wait to see the finished result. I can appreciate how long that might be

microUgly wrote:This is coming along really nice. I can't wait to see the finished result. I can appreciate how long that might be

Doesnt actually take that long normally in terms of elapsed hours, its just finding time to play with things like this


Still needs highlights in hair, and a bit more tweaking here and there. (like I'm not happy with the shoulder.)

Thank you for posting images of the process as well... this looks amazing! Tho I bet there are some people who would see the final and think it was the result of a trace... that would be sad.

k, gonna call it done for now, may play with it a bit further at some point, but for now its a wrap.

Darth_Gimp wrote:Thank you for posting images of the process as well... this looks amazing! Tho I bet there are some people who would see the final and think it was the result of a trace... that would be sad.

yeah, people tend to assume that, although essentially it is just a manual trace. Learnt to say its done manually in the summary at DA

Glad you like it.

It's an awesome drawing. I really like it. Do you posterize the original photo to reveal distinct areas of colour, or do you just eyeball it?

... and feel free to repost this in Finished Inkscape Work.

microUgly wrote:It's an awesome drawing. I really like it. Do you posterize the original photo to reveal distinct areas of colour, or do you just eyeball it?

... and feel free to repost this in Finished Inkscape Work.

Glad you like it, with regards to technique, I just eyeball it. Generally I find if I squint at it a bit I can identify the areas I want. zooming has the same sort of effect.