Fantastic Blognanza!

Whoa! Whoa! Hold on there! Have you read parts one, two, and three of this series yet? Because you should really do that if you haven’t.

Applying a thin reservoir of black pigment to the processed remains of a dead sapling is all well and good, but how do you go about shoving this modest illustration into the realm of the digital — ethereal, intangible, and forever beyond the humble grasp of the human mind?

Why, Here’s HowAdmittedly, the answer isn’t that complicated — though it has the potential to be woefully expensive. At the outset, we considered two options, essentially: A) draw the design with a fancy graphics tablet or B) get a scanner. We opted for option B, although a graphics tablet of some kind would have saved some time.

There’s actually a third option, but we never really pursued it. As these tutorials attest, we could have drawn the darn thing in Inkscape at the outset. I’ve never worked with much other than pens ‘n’ paper, though, so I didn’t (and don’t) imagine that the image would have improved drastically had we pursued that route.

Yakkin’ About TabletsI haven’t done a whole lot of research regarding different graphics tablets, though I hear a lot of people pining after Wacom’s Cintiq tablet — mainly because holy crap you can draw directly on the screen dude. Personally, I’m torn as to whether I’d prefer using a tablet to draw things as opposed to pens ‘n’ paper. There’s a certain spontaneity with the latter that can be lost if you introduce a technological artifice to the process. Still, there’s less mucking around of the sort I’ll describe shortly. Also, drawing an octopus doesn’t cost $2000 if you use a sketchbook!

The Wonders of Option BNo graphics tablet for the Bonanziers, then. This leaves the mighty Scanner, whose type and quality don’t particularly matter, considering the subsequent step. You see, after we scanned the image, we proceeded to trace the entire image in Inkscape. (You remember Inkscape, don’t you?)

Yakkin’ About InkscapeAdmittedly, laboriously tracing an image in Inkscape also eliminates a great deal of the aforementioned spontaneity. It certainly cleans the image to a supreme degree, though — a crucial fact considering the hefty resolutions necessary for screen printing. And as far as “tracing images vs. buying a tablet” goes, not only is Inkscape freeware, but my brother’s printer/scanner/copier was purchased by someone who is not me. Zero dollars vs. hundreds of dollars — not much of a contest there.

Anyhow, this was my first time tracing images in Inkscape, although Joe had endured the process a year prior when refining The Birthday Party and Mustachio. As you can probably imagine, I didn’t find the process particularly engaging, though an increasing familiarity with hotkeys and the like helped to speed things along.

Marginally Technical Vector Graphics StuffIf you really want a brief visual summary of the tracing process, feel free to take a quick gander below:

Nodes! Overlay! Substrata!

You can see a few things at work here, though I don’t want to cover the process in too much depth. We imported the original black-and-white scanned image into Inkscape and traced the lines on a new layer with a contrasting color (usually red) set at a lowish opacity (so’s we could see what we were tracing). In this image, the juxtaposition of black and red especially highlights our rearrangement of underground objects. Those gray nodes encircling the octopus essentially tell the computer where a line begins, how it curves, and where it stops. While I managed to trace most of the image with lines of consistent width — a pretty straightforward process — parts of the image, such as the grass, proved to be more complex:

There are so many.

Industry standards would regard the project as relatively simple, surely — not so for someone using this software for the first time. Things turned out pretty well in the end, though.

The End ResultAnyway, after some quantity of time elapsed, we ended up with the image below:

BEHOLD. For real this time.

Not much content difference between this one and the last one, besides rearranging the junk in the ground and excising the gnarly knot on the tree.

That about sums it up, really. Stick around for our next installment: Culling Chromatic Configurations!