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eikonabridge
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Joined: 25 Sep 2014
Age: 61
Gender: Male
Posts: 929

28 Dec 2017, 5:08 pm

Finally got sometime to clean up my daughter's comic drawings. In the process I also learned to use Inkscape (plus GIMP) to smooth out hand-drawn curves. I know these tasks are daily bread-and-butter for graphical artists, but, still, I've had fun. Here is an example of before vs. after:

Image

Some technical details:
(a) Use GIMP's color select to pick up the pencil outlines.
(b) Clean up. Use Gaussian Blur filter (5 pixels or there about). Then transform to black-and-white outline pixels using the Threshold function.
(c) Import into Inkscape and use Trace Bitmap to vectorize the outline curves. Export the image to rasterized. Clean up a bit more.
(d) Import back into GIMP as a new layer with transparency. Lay it on top of the original image. Do final clean up.

- - -

Sure, I know soon enough there will be Deep Learning (AI) versions of all those graphical tools, and life will be a lot easier to do image processing. Still, it's kind of rewarding to see the final image.

The thing is, there are plenty of autistic graphical artists out there. Yet, I see a huge disconnect between parents and children. Not so many parents raise their autistic children, graphically. See, when my children were young, I was the one drawing pictures for them. Today, they are the ones drawing wonderful pictures (and making up stories). It did not take that long... I just planted the seed, and a few years later I am collecting my harvest. It's so heartwarming to see them thrive.

Instead of ABA therapists, what our society really needs are good graphical-artist-story-tellers. Autistic children would develop so much better that way.


_________________
Jason Lu
http://www.eikonabridge.com/