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Have you ever thought about what you could do with your photographs? There are so many possibilities. For example, you could reduce down your photo to black and white, color it in, add a few thought bubbles and make your own comic strip. Or, you could create a clay caricature of the subject of your photo. You could transfer the image onto a square block of fabric and sew it into a heirloom quilt. You could turn it into a wood plaque carved with a scroll saw or a table top make with marquetry inlay techniques. You could create a 3D hologram, Warhol style pop-art print, or ascii art poster. Or you could turn your photo into a wire sculpture, ceramic mosaic or etched glass goblet. The possibilities are endless.

A key step in producing many of these object’s d art is to reduce the photograph down to a black and white line drawing. Graphic editing programs, such as Adobe’s Photoshop, provides automated ways to do this; however, unless you’re willing to drop $700 for a legal copy of Photoshop, you may think you are out of luck. The truth is, you can achieve most of the same effects, including the photo-to-sketch function, using the GNU Image Manipulation program, or GIMP. With GIMP, you can manipulate colors, reduce noise, selectively cut and paste objects within a photograph, work in layers, shrink or enlarge your image, and export your photo in a variety of file formats. GIMP even runs most Photoshop functions. Combine GIMP with other free software, like ImageMagick, a tool that lets you quickly manipulate graphics files, and Inkscape, which lets you convert to/from vector graphics formats, and you have a fully functioning graphics suite.

You can find tutorials on GIMP.org detailing how to turn a photo into a sketch. The resulting sketch is, in my opinion, very busy when this method. A similar method on Spoono.com produces cleaner results, though still too many lines for my taste. I prefer to use the method described by Vidar Madsen in his GIMPy high pass filter sketch effect tutorial. Using this method produces a drawing that is clean and simple, though I have to admit that sometimes, I prefer the old fashioned way…I fire up GIMP, create a blank layer and trace my image to create the line art.

Depending upon your project, I am sure that all of these methods will produce satisfactory results for you. Give them a try and let me know what you think.

Until next time,
-Texaiano

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