Welcome to Lesson 4. This time we get to work with an image! Yay! Well, don't get too excited. We're going to prepare this image so that it is ready for use in the next lesson where we really roll up our sleeves and start the pattern-making process. So this lesson is pretty straightforward and will go pretty quick. Besides, I covered a lot in the lasts lesson to keep you plenty busy...LOL.

In this lesson, we'll download our image, prepare our pattern document, layout guidelines, and re-size our image.

I was trying to figure out what portrait I wanted to use in this class. Since we're doing a portrait pattern, I figured you weren't too interested in doing a portrait of my uncle Joe. So I figured a celebrity would have more of a wider appeal and be a bit more interesting. The tricky thing is to find a celebrity picture that doesn't have a lot of copyright restrictions. I guess most celebrity photographers want to make money with their pics. Who knew.  I turned to WikiMedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons is the media repository for the Wikipedia project. The nice thing about this website is that it lays out the terms of copyright and license. That way we can see if it's something we can legally use.

I ended up finding a nice picture of Captain Kirk...yup, Mr. William Shatner! If we look at the licensing terms, we can see it is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5 license. Basically, it says we're allowed to use this image whichever way we want, as long as the original author is credited and we release our derivative work under the same license. So Jerry Avenaim was kind enough to donate the image for public use under this license. How cool is that?

Remember me preaching about a high-resolution picture? Well, if you look at the full resolution picture of William Shatner (click the image in Wikimedia Commons), you'll notice it is fairly small. While this is not an ideal size, I think it will work well for us. I chose this image because it really has a nice color balance. The contrast and highlights are very nice and the skin tones are even across the picture. You can clearly see all of the detail we'll need to pull a pattern from it. So, despite the fact it is lower-than-ideal resolution, the fact that it has all of these other things going for it will more than compensate for the resolution shortcomings. I'm confident this picture will produce really good results for us. You can download the picture here, or click the image on the left.

Go ahead and open up your downloaded picture into GIMP (File>Open). Here is our picture of Bill. We won't be using this document to design our portrait. If you look at the size of this image (Image>Canvas Size), you notice it is only 3.4x4.7". This is much too small to cut. Instead, we'll create a new document that is 8x10". I like working in this size because it's easy to find frames for the final cutting. So let's create our new document in which we'll be working on our final pattern in.

Go to File>New and that will pop up a Create A New Image dialog box. This is where we'll set up our document dimensions. There is a template pull-down menu, but they don't offer an 8x10" option. So we'll have to make a custom document. Make sure your units are in inches (pull-down menu next to the Height field. It's pixels by default). Then it's just a matter of typing in our dimensions (8" for the width, 10" for the height).

Now that we have the height and width set, we have to set the resolution. By default, the resolution is 72 pixels per inch. This is much too small. It makes it hard to get the detail you want out of a pattern. A popular resolution is 300 pixels per inch. This is overkill. It makes too large of a file for what we need. My favorite size is 150 pixels per inch. This seems to be a happy medium. Just enough resolution for me to get the detail I want, but not too much. Plus I know that a 3-pixel brush size is about the width of the kerf of a scroll saw blade. I also know that a 5-pixel brush size is the width of the kerf of a spiral scroll saw blade (#5 spiral). This is a nice point of reference when creating patterns and we'll be discussing brushes in more detail in Lesson 6. But for now, we need to change the default 72 pixels per inch resolution to 150 pixels per inch resolution. Click the + sign next to the Advanced Options. You'll see the X & Y Resolution fields there. Just change them from 72 to 150.

There are a couple more options under the Advanced Options too. The color space will always remain RGB, so keep that at its default. For the Fill With field, let's choose white. This will create a white document, which is much easier to see and work with. The comments field is unnecessary. Click OK and we have our pattern document set!

OK. We now have our pattern document. The size is 8x10". But since we're going to put this into a frame, a little bit of the frame will overlap our cutting. So we should take that into account. I figure if we have a 1/4" margin around our entire design, we should be pretty safe. So to help us to remember to keep that margin, we'll create guidelines. Guidelines are there for reference only. They will never be printed. You can use guidelines for alignment, marking reference points, or as in our case, creating margins. Creating a guideline is easy. You'll notice along the left and top of the screen, you'll see rulers. These rulers will be in inches. If not, change the units to inches in the lower-left corner of your screen (covered in Lesson 3). We'll also use the coordinate readings on the lower-left corner. So to create a guideline, click on the ruler and drag it out toward the center of your pattern. Keep an eye on the coordinates in the lower-left corner and drop the guideline at 1/4" from the edge. Continue doing this across all 4 sides of the document. If you mess up, you can hover over the guideline and it will change to red/pink. Click and drag to reposition the guideline. If you want to delete a guideline, drag the guideline back onto the ruler and it will disappear.

Now that we have our pattern document set up, let's stick our picture in there. Click the picture of Bill to make that window active. In your Layers dockable dialog box (see Lesson 3 if you don't have it), you'll see a layer called Background. You can drag this background layer onto your pattern document and this will copy the layer. Alternatively, you can highlight the layer and press Ctrl+C to copy the background layer to your clipboard. Then click your pattern document and press Ctrl+V to paste the image from your clipboard to your pattern document. Either method works well.

In the tool palette, choose the Scale tool (Shift+T unless you reassigned the shortcut). Click on the picture of Shatner and it will pop up a dialog box. You can scale an image in two ways. You can either type in the dimensions in the dialog box, or use the nodes on the picture. Nodes are the little squares at the corners of the picture and in the middle of the edges. Grab one of the corner nodes and drag it around. You'll notice that it will change the aspect ratio and really mess up the image (it gets really skinny or really fat). We want to scale the image equally along the X-axis as well as the Y-axis. Click the reset button in the Scaling dialog box to undo your previous scaling. You can constrain the aspect ratio in two ways. First, you can click the little linking chain next to the width and height fields. Then you can grab a corner node and the image will scale equally along the X and Y-axis. Alternatively, you can hold down the Ctrl key while dragging a corner node. That, too, will scale the image equally along the X and Y-axis.

So continue resizing the image so that Bill fits nicely within your margins of the pattern document. Remember to constrain the aspect ratio while resizing. I have the edge of his hair along the top margin, and each shoulder touching the side margins. You'll notice that his shirt goes beyond the bottom margin. This is OK. His shirt isn't important information, so we'll just leave off any of the shirt that goes beyond the bottom margin. When you're happy with the image, click the Scale button in the dialog box to tell the computer this is the size you want it. The computer will recalculate the image to the size you indicated.

To save your image, go to File>Save. This will pop up a dialog box. Browse to the folder where you'd like to save your file. At the top of the screen, you'll see a Name field. This is where you name your file. One thing about GIMP that is cool, is you can add whatever extension you want and GIMP is smart enough to save it as that kind of file. So if you called it Shatner.jpg, GIMP will save it as a jpeg image. Since we want a raw file, we'll add the extension as xcf. So your image would be called Shatner.xcf.

You can also just type in a basic name like "Shatner" in the Name field. Then go down to the pull-down box that says "All Images" and choose GIMP XCF image. Then when you press Save, it will add the extension for you. You can also click the + button next to Select by File Type and then choose GIMP XCF image. Either way will work.

We want to save our image as GIMP XCF image because it holds all of our layer's information. This allows us to manipulate individual layers rather than merging down our layers into one. This will be important as we start working on our patterns. We'll cover layers in the next lesson.

Well, that's it. Now we're ready to start working on our base pattern, which we'll cover in the next lesson. But before you close everything down, make sure you save!

• Download a copy of the William Shatner picture. Create a new pattern document at 8x10" and create your guidelines. Then re-size your picture to fit within the guidelines.
• If you are working on another portrait along with the class, do the same process with your other picture.
• Practice using guidelines and resizing pictures.