Tracing Bitmaps

I’m not an artist - I just don’t have the knack of being able to start from nothing and pour out goodness. I am, however, good at using artists tools such as The GIMP and Inkscape. I can use these tools to turn out some gems (and a mild amount of crap).

One of my favourite tools in Inkscape is the ‘Trace Bitmap…’ tool (under the Path menu). This tool takes a bitmap for input, and traces it into vector components. Of course it’s not perfect but it’s a very good starting point for taking a rough image and turning it into something nice.

On the way home tonight, I happened past the Four Square in Brockville and took cellphone shot of ‘Mr Four Square’ (who I was sure whose name was ‘Andy’ for some reason) and then began the digital remastering. The results are (imhfo) impressive! Get the SVG here (110kB)

I was a little surprised when I Googled for the official Four Square website and found a the rather shonky looking site with a rejigged ‘Four Square Man’. Boo, hiss! I don’t know how new the rebranded image is but it’s been on that website since 10/10/2005. I guess the Brockville Four Square isn’t exactly the height of society (although at approx 300m above sea level it is probably arguing for the title of 2nd highest dairy in Dunedin [guess]…)

I also guffawed when I found that the webmaster for the site had decided not to hide all the detail of the ASP.NET errors when an error condition occurred. Go ahead G, find some vulns.