jujumantb
10+ year member
Duke of Earl
been doing a bunch of these recently, a few of the guys on another forum wanted to know how, so i wrote this thing up, thought i'd post it here since most of you are diy-ers...
Stuff you need:
- about 2 hours
- 1/8" thick hardboard (like pegboard but without the holes... i use 2ft x 2ft and 2ft x 1 ft pieces, i suggest menards because they have precut pieces)
-2" painters masking tape (i use the delicate kind, DO NOT use normal yellow masking tape, it will rip the paint up)
- x-acto knife or any fine razor blade
- spraypaint, whichever colors you want... i like flat or satin finish
- pencil and sharpie marker
First, look for a photo, preferrably with some good shadows, I found this pic of bob dylan on yahoo image search, then copy it to your photo editting software. (i use paint shop pro, very similar to photoshop, im 99% sure photoshop has all the same features plus some)
Now, we need to convert it to less colors, you can make these paintings with as many colors as you want, but each extra color means lots more work...
Now this can be tricky, play with the settings a bit until you get something thats starting to look ok..
After applying your changes, you may want to remove background stuff you dont want in the painting, also, if the stencil seems too complicated, play around with blur and contrast settings- then re-do the the step above to bring it back to 2-colors total, this photo didnt require any of that extra playing...
Now, if you are an amazing artist, you can go ahead and draw this on your hardboard... but for accuracy, its pretty necessary to put a grid over it. Before we do this, we need to resize the photo to a smaller version of our hardboard. Since im doing this painting on a total of 2ft x 3ft piece of hardboard, I just divided those inch mesurements by 8 (to make it 1/8th scale) to get 3inches by 4.5 inches. Next, File -> New, and create the new dimensions as 3inch b 4.5 inch and copy the photo onto it as a new layer, then pull the corner to resize the layer to fill the 3inch by 4.5 inch image
Now we have a 1/8th scale of what our final product will be. The reason that is important it so that we can put a grid over it to make exactly 2" x 2" grid squares on our hardboard to make drawing the image WAY easier.
Now, in PSP, its View -> change grid properties.. and set them to 1/4" (which multiplied by 8 will eventually translate to 2")
View -> Show Grid
Now, since the image wont print with the grid, hit the print screen button on your keyboard and paste the screenshot into the program. select just the gridded photo and cut - paste it again, you'll end up with this...
Then print it...
