Question about making patterns

[woodwilldo]

This is my first post and i have to say from reading all of the posts here there is alot of talent and knowledge here. I am currently just doing some scroll sawing of basic patterns and i have started to get into making my own scroll saw portraits but this intarsia deal is great. I have made a couple intarisa items before but i was wonting to really make my own patterns. I was wondering if anyone on here makes their own patterns and if you do how do you go about it. I have corel draw, adobe photoshop and paintshop pro. Any suggestions and help would be great.

thanks in advance
Jesse

[Steviegwood]

Hi Jesse, and welcome to the family. A lot of us are making at least some of our own patterns. I mostly do fretwork and portraits but if you are looking for intarsia artists you are in for a treat with the talents here on this forum. And the fret workers not including me are terrific too. I have learned alot here. Just have not got up the nerve to do intarsia yet. Steve

[MikeDingas]

I'm finishing up a fretwork pattern and plan on trying an Intartia pattern next (which will be my first). That said, I would suggest you first go to your bookstore or library and find a book on Intartia. Reading about the cutting process and looking at actual patterns will help in your design.

Images with little shading should be easier to convert to Intartia than those with shading. I would try the features in your graphics program that alter the colors or their numbers. Example: import a photo and then reduce the number of colors to, say, 8. You'll see a potential pattern begin to emerge.

Here's my avitar reduce to 8 colors.

[workin for wood]

I just use a paper and pencil. It's like drawing a coloring book picture. Sometime's I use photographs, and those are much easier. Load the photo onto the computer, open the file, enlarge/zoom in on it. Tape paper to computer screen, turn off lights, trace outlines. Remove paper, do some editing, adding or removing some lines, maybe alter the position of the person/animal, add some background. Once that's done, carbon trace it to a clean sheet of paper and off to kinko's for copies or enlargements.

Don't be tracing other peoples intarsias. You can use parts of copyrighted artwork as long as you make enough changes to take you away from the original. The law from what I understand says 10% changes are good enough to make it a totally new product, and that doesn't include the medium. If you copied something, but say you changed it because it's made of wood, that's not going to cut it. If you copy a man, give him a hat, a belt, change the position of his arms, put him in the jungle, and/or give him a woman partner to be with...that's a whole new design. Technically, you can find several pictures, paintings, photographs and whatever else and then intermix them all together to become something completely new.
I often wish I had the software and the know-how to be able to digitally alter photos, but alas I just have some pencils, erasers and a power sharpener.

[woodwilldo]

Thanks

Thank you to all who have posted so far. This place is great I can't believe it took me this long after scrolling for 2 years to find this very informative site.

Jesse

[Kevin12]

Welcome, WoodWilldo! This is truly a great forum. Like Steve, I do primarily fretwork, but would like to get into Intarsia a little more. I think that with Corel and PSP, you should do fine. And the pencil-and-paper technique is bound to work, too. Somewhere recently there was a huge thread on making patters using PSP with links to tutorials and tons of info. But just the little bit I've piddled around with it all, I think the technique for making Intarsia patterns may be a little different from, say, making fretwork patterns from photos. With Intarsia, you "simply" have to trace borders. (So why haven't I produced a bunch of stuff yet if it's so "simple"?)

Again, welcome!