I was politely asked to do some graphical work. It's not exactly my pair of shoes, but lets try. The point is, that the idea was quite funny an interesting, for it was not the standard "Go Team Go" Banner, but it was actually a guide for a choreography the public should do while the supporting band plays a new song.

And Misch, who's idea this was, was already thinking ahead by making a series of pictures with the girls-team hitting the "coupe" finals next Saturday. So his initial idea was a simple photomontage of these pictures with the text of the song below, so the public could imitate the gestures corresponding to the text.

So I went off with those pictures, and that idea. Unfortunately the pictures were a little too low-res for the size of the banner, so a normal montage would have looked awful. I was then thinking of 2 techniques to change the appearance of the pictures. First: The print technique with big half-tones. This would have been to much of a commercial, so I was hitting the comic-style road.

The first try was total photoshopping (I'm actually using the Gimp, but this word is more current). I went trough several techniques I found on the Internet, but nothing was convincing me. The problem was, that the pictures were taken with a frontal flash, which makes most filtering methods useless. So there I was, frustrated and clueless.

Bitmap tracing. Yes, it's always coming down to this. Maybe because I am not proficient enough with photoshopping, but mostly because I feel familiar with vectors. And when nothing goes, vectors rule. I made two different bitmaps for each picture, one to make an edge trace, the other to get the colors. Then I added the contour paths from Gimp that I made for cutting the shapes. That looked a little "pop-graph" but I was not re-inventing the wheel here. But now I had readable graphics for a public audience, and the girls of the team can still be recognized (with a little imagination).

Then I discovered something very stupid. My screen was still in movie mode, and the colors were ******. Back to work then. I had to re-colorize the clothes with the actual team-yellow. This is very unforunate because as it were traces I had to make a lot of path operations, duplication, drawing, cutting etc. on a file that was becoming quite huge... But in the end it worked out.

The final page-layout is based on a sequence of 3 A0 formats printable on a design tracer. The owner of the printer will be grateful for the few colors used and the big white spaces.

And yes... The Banner was printed and they even made flyers. Thanks a lot Misch, and don't hesitate to ask me again if something nice comes up. Unfortunately the team lost by 1 point. Damn Murphy's law! Next time then!

So here is the result: 

Resources:
http://www.gimp.org/
http://www.inkscape.org/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/gimpusers/discuss/72157604952794977/
http://ocaoimh.ie/2004/10/01/cartoonizing-photos-with-the-gimp/
http://www.inkscape.org/doc/tracing/tutorial-tracing.html
http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/
Other stuff I don't remember.