Convert A Picture For Carving
Artwork and directions by Sunni Bergeron
Photograph by Connie Herbert

When I get ready to make a portrait carving of someone, I use a digital image/picture/graphic. I pull this image up in my graphics editor. I use PaintShop Pro, but the following steps can be accomplished in almost any reasonable graphics editor. You'll have to use your application's Help to locate just where these commands are. Make sure you enable Multiple Undo in your application.

1. Make a Duplicate of the original picture. Close the original and save the duplicate. The duplicate is the one you will edit. This demonstration uses a photograph of Connie Herbert's grandson.

2. Add Noise to the duplicate. This step you will probably need to accomplish more than once until you get the image you want to refine. There will likely be several different radio buttons or check boxes you can fiddle with. Play around until you get Noise in the image looking something like the picture below.

3. Now Decrease Color of your image to 2 Colors (1 bit). This will convert your image to black and white. If the image doesn't have enough detail or if there is too much Noise, hit your Undo command until you reach the clean picture and Add Noise again using different settings. Keep going back and forth until you get an image you can work with.

4. Once you have an image you can refine, open the original image and lay it next to the noisy black and white. Now erase the extraneous noise and reinforce areas with solid lines to better bring out the personality of the person. Using the original portrait to compair to, you can figure out where the "missing" eyebrows or tooth lines or whatever are. Below is my quick and dirty cleaned up version of Connie's grandson. Her mileage may vary.

 

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Copyright 2005-2006 Jacqueline Fitzgerald Graham
Last revised: May 16, 2006.
Webmistress: Sunni Bergeron