Wednesday, December 12, 2018

The Great State Of.....Scroll Saw Pattern. All 50 States.


Patterns for all 50 states.  

New Giveaway below. Make sure you scroll down to enter.

CorelDraw: Do you want to design scroll saw patterns?

CorelDraw

I want to take just a few words to talk about the software I use to design my patterns. I receive quite a bit of email asking how to get started doing what I do. This won't be detailed but just an overview.

I use several software packages to design my patterns but the primary one is CorelDraw. CorelDraw is a program for graphic designers. It is used for many different types of graphic design applications. Web graphics, product graphics fine art and more. 

There are two different types of graphics software. Bitmap and vector. 

I am grossly oversimplifying this but a bitmap graphics program is used for editing photos and drawing graphics a pixel at a time. Photoshop and Paintshop Pro are examples of bitmap graphics programs although they do have some vector capabilities.

A vector graphics program uses mathematical formulas to draw an object on the screen. A line is just a calculation of all the points between two nodes. A circle is calculated by its diameter. The advantage with vector graphics is that they can be edited and scaled without loss of detail. The formula is just updated and the object is redrawn on the screen. The objects and also be merged and subtracted with simple commands. This is critical for scroll saw patterns.

For scroll saw patterns it is desirable to have fine crisp lines when printed out. Vector graphics programs can produce fine crisp lines without jaggies when enlarged. 

Here are examples of Bitmap vs Vector.
 Bitmap as drawn

 Bitmap enlarged.

 Vector as drawn