Regarding fonts and numbers. Here is a block number that I typed into the tool using a simple sans font and then converted to a polygon. Then I simply manipulated (added, subtracted, moved) points until I matched the original. Once happy I cloned the shape to create a shadow. End result is pictured (original scan on right). Not bad.

522012_105454_AM.png

my art skills & press are here should you need assistance.

You got mad skills. Nice work. I am just learning, comparatively.

Have a question for those of you with art skills. Simple shapes and lettering like my Gottlieb's Big Hit example are pretty straight-forward. I am curious if there are tips and tricks others can provide when it comes to tracing a screened image that was a "sketch" originally such as this sling I am working on (see pic).

On the left is my tracing so far. In the middle is a photo I found on ebay that's somewhat skewed and medium quality. On the far right is a very hi-res scan of a homebrew sling plastic that's inkjet paper glued to PETG. I assume the creator of this plastic scanned an original but who knows.

So far I have just been tracing the image and making one white (or grey) polygon at a time. Very slow going, but it's looking pretty good. Any tips for how to speed things up or am I doing what others would also do?

TIA!

522012_22006_PM.png

I have been thinking the same, actually, but didn't include them in my list of 8 pieces for the trial run since they are so simple and don't make much of a tutorial. Mine are trashed and have packing tape patches all over. It's also lower on my list of priorities since those plastics are so hidden during game play.

They sell those silver photo markers and you could add the stars by hand and probably get a nice look. You could also just make holes for the stars. That might end up looking pretty cool, although not entirely original, of course.

Very nice job on that. I'll give the stormtroopers a similar treatment and see what I can come up with. Wishing my originals were better.

Just a Sunday night update. Haven't been posting but I have been working on this. Many thanks to pinball customs for the advice which led to me getting Boba Fett traced nicely.

Big Hit - 80% traced
R Sling - 0% traced - now scanned
L Sling - 40% traced - now scanned
Boba - 90% traced (see pic)
IG88 - 0% traced - now scanned
R Deathstar - 0% traced - now scanned
L Deathstar - 0% traced - now scanned
Bib Fortuna - 0% traced - Not scanned or removed from machine.

562012_91136_PM.png

Question for the artists of the world. I've got a 600dpi scanned image of a plastic that's 5 colors. I used photoshop and put each color into its own layer the best I could. There was some noise here and there, of course. Then I exported each color into its own TIF. Next I imported each TIF as a linked layer in Inkscape. I autotraced these TIFs one by one so that I had 5 layers of vector art -- one for each color.

For the amount of work I've done thus far, I'm surprisingly close. Still have the typical cleanup work for eliminate some oddball points and re-draw some shapes.

My biggest problem is that when I was selecting the colors of the raster image there was a certain amount of "noise" where the colors met. See the pic of IG88. Where blue meets black there should be no white. White represents part of the image that he software wasn't able to identify as either or.

Now that it's vector art, is there a way to get gray and black to snap together? Sorry for my amatuerish understanding of these tools. I'm learning as I go.

572012_24741_PM.png

Thanks. Good tips. I am going back to raster for now to eliminate the noise prior to vectorizing. I jumped the gun, I think.