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First Silhouette Portait Cut!


Kevin Futter

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I've been hacking away at this beast for the last few weeks now, in the hopes that it would help restore my mojo after a long hiatus from the bench. It's by Fantastic Plastic, in 1/144 scale, and represents a Northrop concept design for a nuclear-powered flying-wing bomber:

 

hmnnTK.jpg

 

The included decals were a bit rubbish, and both USAF decals were damaged, so I decided to finally break out my Silhouette Portrait for the first time in the more than two years since I purchased it, and make my first set of masks. I simply scanned the decals, cleaned them up in Photoshop, imported the result into Silhouette Studio, and used the trace function to give me the necessary outlines. Here's the result:

 

ZbWWMk.jpg

 

I'm quite chuffed with the way they came out. It's baby steps for sure, but this was the perfect task to cut my teeth on, and I'm now looking forward to using it on other projects, and for more complicated tasks.

 

I'll post a photo of the final result when it's ready.

 

Kev

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4 hours ago, Mozart said:

Good on you Kev!  Must admit I've never used the trace-function, preferring to "do my own" thing.  I've read reports that were less than impressed with trace-function results but yours seems to have turned out very well.

Max

 

It didn't work too well with the raw scan in JPEG format, so I spent about 30 minutes cleaning it up in Photoshop, and turned it into a PNG file. This not only worked better for tracing, but had the added benefit of being imported at the correct size, whereas the 1200 DPI JPEG file came in at full size, and required a bit of mucking around to resize it accurately. Luckily it only had to be close for this build, not perfect. But for jobs that required more sizing precision, it may well be a nightmare.

 

So, the first lesson if you're going to trace an image is to try have your source file in PNG format!

 

Kev

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On 8/31/2020 at 2:20 PM, Kevin Futter said:

It didn't work too well with the raw scan in JPEG format, so I spent about 30 minutes cleaning it up in Photoshop, and turned it into a PNG file. This not only worked better for tracing, but had the added benefit of being imported at the correct size, whereas the 1200 DPI JPEG file came in at full size, and required a bit of mucking around to resize it accurately. Luckily it only had to be close for this build, not perfect. But for jobs that required more sizing precision, it may well be a nightmare.

 

Hey Kevin, you can resize any image once opened in Silhouette. No matter what size the image is

jpeg or otherwise. First select the image, drag a rectangle around it or go up to edit and scroll down

to 'select all'. Once selected the rectangel will show you the actual size of the image.  A toolbar will

open above (see screenshot below) you can insert the exact dimensions you want and hit enter and

the image will resize to those dimesions right down to ten thousands of an inch. To the right of the

red arrows is a padlock symbol. Just click on it to lock or unlock. When it's locked you can insert

either the X or Y dimension and they will both resize proportionally.

This may not help with tracing but you can resize any image this way.

HTHspacer.png

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