Good evening! A week ago when I introduced myself to this forum, I said one of the challenges of being me is that my ambition sometimes goes far beyond my ability! This might be one of those times! I am taking my first crack at creating a pattern, and I think I may have chosen a rather complicated one to begin with! I would like to carve a CID badge, but I dont want the final product to look like a router traced some lines on some wood. I have been working with several different images of the badge to see how each behaves when placed in the pattern editor and I am running into some challenges, i think in part due to how shiny it is.
1. My biggest frustration for the last couple hours has been the head and legs of the eagle. When you look at the badge you can see that they are raised more than the area surrounding them. Is there a way to select these elements to raise? Inverting doesnt work, and i thought the magic wand could do it, but i find the magic wand just highlights the whole darn thing!
2. The feathers! when imported into the editor they are either raised outlines, or carved outlines, and I dont like either! I would like to make them carve as they are on the badge. I worked with the blur tool and the paint brush, but it seems incredibly time consuming for the produced results.
I am open to any tips you may have. I am not by any means asking anyone to make this pattern for me, part of the fun of this machine has been learning how to do things! The tutorials and manual are pretty vague. So if you have a spare moment or two and dont mind taking a look at the image and giving me some pointers, that would be awesome!