Pic of the guys

[smwoodcrafts]

I got a great plug on Tuesday or Wednesday after I sent them a picture I cut out of wood.

A while ago, I asked for a highres pic of the guys for a project I wanted to do. No one had one, but I found one I thought I could use on Zane's Facebook page before he went private. After a lot of work to get the pattern made, I was able to cut out a portrait of them In wood. I promised to show everyone after I was done so here is what they received as a gift.



Hotwings did get the process incorrect, though. He talked about it being automatic. That I just scanned the pic in and a digital machine cut it out. That isn't correct. Everything is done by hand, the pattern creation and the cutting of the portrait. I use a scroll saw.
Here is the picture I used:



Tell me what you think.

smwoodcrafts
Dan Seymour

[Biff]

It looks great but isn't flattering to FB's hairline!

[potthole]

Aside from FB, everybody looks pretty much spot-on.

[smwoodcrafts]

Hair can be hard when the background is so dark. I had tried to get a better pic to use, but there were none available. Also, having four people in the same pic, it's hard to get a lot of detail. As they mentioned, I have a lot of others on my website.

http://smwoodcrafts.com/indexportrait.htm

smwoodcrafts

[potthole]

Oh yeah, I can see why you had the issues, the top of FB's head blends in with the dark background. Overall, that looks great.

[-Jiggy-]

Reminds me of the animation for the A-ha video "Take On Me"

[jackmehoff]

Anybody else think FB looks kinda drunk in that picture?

[smwoodcrafts]

Well, they all look a little constipated. They were all going for the "serious" look. I would have rather had pics of them smiling, but this was the best I could find. I asked them, several times, to send promo pics of each of them, but they never did. I wanted to do a portrait more on the lines of the Three Stooges around the logo. Oh well, you get lemons, you make lemonade.

smwoodcrafts

[linzi]

I think it looks great! Thanks for sharing. You're really talented.

[Queenie]

Great job Dan! I'm sure they really appreciated it.

[Titan!]

Wow. That's pretty impressive.

Do you think that if woodcuts were still as popular today as they were in the 1500's there would be a computer program call Adobe Woodshop CS3 ?

I am very interested in how you created this.

[smwoodcrafts]

Here's a Reader Digest version of the precedure.

I get either a high resolution digital image or hard copy to scan.

It's then opened in a photo editing program like Photoshop.

In Photoshop, the picture goes through MANY different editing procedures from changing brightness and contrast to bring out light and dark areas to using a pen tablet like a Wacom tablet to do some drawing. This is what takes all the time. The picture is done in sections so I can concentrate and manipulate for just that section.

It then needs to be approved by the customer.

After approval, it's printed out on sticky paper so the pattern can be placed on the wood.

A hole is drilled out of every black section so a scroll saw blade can threaded in and the black sections are cut with a scroll saw by hand.

This is my saw:



Well, maybe it was a little longer than planned.

Thanks,

Dan Seymour
smwoodcrafts.com