Was continuing on with stern decorations for the HMS Alfred this morning and thought I would briefly describe how we integrate historical artwork into a technical CAD drawing. As we can see from the image below, Dave Stevens' nice CAD drawing does not include the historical artwork that is needed on the lower area of the side gallery. We want this artwork to be there so that when we render the part in 3D we will be able to create the detail for the model. Please understand this is a "work in progress" and is not yet complete. But here are the basic steps.
1. First we need to locate some historical artwork for this area of the ship. In this case, it comes from Romero's book.
2. We photograph the page from the book, bring it into the computer and import the image into our drawing software. In this case Corel Draw X8.
3. Next, we crop the image, trace the drawing, resize it, and remove all the color. Then we save it as a new piece of "line art".
4. We then take this line art and overlay it on top of Dave's CAD drawing.
5. From here we use our editing tools to manipulate and artwork to match up with the CAD drawing. Since the artwork was hand drawn and Dave's CAD work is computer drafted they will never be a perfect match. This is where a lot of creative work is needed to get the line art to fit the precise CAD drawings.
6. The edited line art is in red overlayed on top of the original CAD in black. As you can see I have not yet finished the editing work. There is a lot of stretching, moving, resizing, skewing, etc that has to be done. In Corel Draw I am using the Node Editing feature to accomplish most of this work.
7. Even though it will take me some time to finish this, it is still a lot easier than drawing it from scratch as I am not an "artist". Another way I could have done this would have been to use my digital drawing tablet to trace the artwork by hand. However, it would have probably taken about the same amount of time.
8. Once all the editing is complete we will simply combine the artwork with the rest of the CAD drawing for our future 3D rendering and parts fabrication.
You will also note I have also created the window parts for the side galleries. I only had to do one side and then mirror the drawing to get the other side done. This ensures both sides are identical.