Sketch picture for perf pattern

I'd like to make a sheet metal panel with a profile of Duke Ellington.
This panel will be around 18 x 20 inches and Duke's profile will be
shown with perforated holes of various sizes, punched on a turret
press. We'll show this part to our customer as a sample. Eventually
we'll make others, about 4 x 8 feet in size with other famous dead
people such as Einstein, Washington, Lincoln, and perhaps some that
are living. The end of this is putting these in a school as an
inspiration to the students and a barrier around a playground.

So far I've inserted a sketch picture of Duke in my part, and then on
separate sketches drawn around the picture and used the fill pattern
for the perf hole locations. I plan to vary the hole and pattern sizes
to get some shading.

Have any of you done this type of thing? Any suggestions for me?

Thanks for any comments or suggestions. Diego

 

Cool idea! Don't they call the varying dot sizes "halftone" when they use it
for printing? There must be programs that generate the halftone pattern from
a given image for a particular size output. Seems like you could trick such
a program into giving you the "correct" pattern of dots. Then you are stuck
with the fun part of figuring out how to generate a sketch from the dot
pattern.

You're liable to end up with an enormous number of holes. I hope you've got
a fast machine and a lot of memory!

Jerry Steiger

 

Thanks Jerry. You helped point me in a helpful direction. I'll let you
know how this works out.

I checked with my daughter, a graphics designer and she responded:

I like the line about "with other famous dead people."
I guess I would need to see what the images look
like to start with. Making it into a dot pattern can
be done in either Photoshop or Illustrator. I turned
an object into a dot pattern for one of my projects
for my Illustrator class, but would need to see the
image to see if it could be done from that.



regards, Diego

 

Diego,

Sounds like you're on the right track. Use the Pattern>Area Fill
feature which will allow you to fill an area with a predefined punch
shape or you're own "seed" feature and control it's perimeter with a
sketch or face boundary. If you have good black and white silhouette
picture of your profiles, you can use 2008's trace picture add-in
(which is know part of Sketch Picture) which will automatically create
a sketch of the profile.

Regards

Mark

 

Thanks Mark. Trace picture sounds great.

I'm lusting for SW2008..............sp 2.1

Diego

 

It's by no means perfect, and it doesn't work on everything but it is
pretty effective on clean, hi-res fill-artwork.

regards

Mark