Inkscape Epiphany!

So, I am not a very techy person, and neither am I a professional artist or craftsperson, so when it came to getting my drawings from my pencil to my printer I relied, not a lot but ENTIRELY, on drawing-scanning-printing (at a pale setting)-drawing over-rescanning-reprinting-redrawing-rescanning-reprinting....ad nauseum. Finally I would print my image to an A4 size, painstakingly draw over all of the rough edges with a dark ink biro, rescan it and resize it, and that was the only way I could get all the lines to have a uniform, smooth black finish, with no 'pixels' or grey spots. I knew it was ridiculous, and tried to use photoshop even just to get all the lines the same black colour, but found it really difficult and frustrating.
And then I found a video on Youtube describing how to turn a bitmap image into a vector image using a free program, Inkscape (upload your image, select it, click 'Path' from the top menu, then 'Trace Bitmap'. It drops the new image right on top of the original, so pull it aside to see how it came out and fiddle the numbers until you are happy). Bitmaps and vectors mean nothing to me, but I realised that they were saying I could put my drawing into this program and with the click of a single button (kinda!) could make it so I would never have jagged, pixelated lines again, no matter how little or large I make my image. All I ever wanted were neat straight lines!
Well, Inkscape delivered. Here's a pic of the Evolution of an Image, from my painfully simple I-can't-go-through-all-that-again pre-Inkscape hand drawing, to the final Inkscape-tastic piece...and yes I do say so myself, just look how sad the first one is!!!

I was really surprised that I caught onto Inkscape 'so easily' = at all!, because as I say the trial photoshop frustrated me so much that if Inkscape hadn't been free I just wouldn't have tried it. Meanwhile I have been working on a design for a t-shirt - it was complex, detailed, difficult...and I enjoyed it so much I made a second as well. That's for a separate post though - I bought a screen printing kit online and have yet to see how well it works. Oh yeah, I have never screenprinted before either!

Belated Hello 2012!

Looks like my last post was April 2011, which is absolutely extraordinary! I've been doing well enough on Etsy, and very much enjoying it, but now I am making an effort to take it a little more seriously and start doing projects that I really enjoy and need to get out of my system! So hopefully, coming soon will be a new shop with it's own url, moving away from the embossing and focusing more on handmade paper, handbound books, and even some screenprinted t-shirt designs. It will be less Oirish, but definitely still Irish, as no doubt the wild west coast here in Connemara is a huge part of my life and so must influence my creativity, such as it is!
But Paperpennies will continue to fend for itself, as it has been doing these past few months, and will be the base line for my new experiments in slightly-less-amateur crafting! Here's a printscreen of Paperpennies on Etsy, today :)