Sticker art?

Badname

I've sotpped doing 3d for quite some time now, and I came across the sticker art scene some days ago and i find it quite cool. Now I wonder some things:

I wanna do some black and white designs like this http://static.flickr.com/59/200006086_666a82435e.jpg?v=0 but what is the right way of doing it? Mine tend to get more grainy, maybe because this maker painted his own instead of useing a photo?
I take an image then make it grey by putting saturation on -100 and put the contrast on maximum. Now I could just be useing a wrong method or i should overpaint the original image?

Another thing, when id like to do like logo's or funny chars i get the idea vector would be better to use.. what program should i use for that? Now i got photoshop7 but it seems more for just pixel stuff.

Help me out here pls
thnx

Neo_God

yeah, most likely what that guy does is, the exact same thing as you, but then takes it into illustrator (the program you'd want to be using for vector art) and uses illustrators "live trace" tool and just turns the photo into vector art so it can be used on various sizes and what not.

Badname

ok thanks now i knwo which program to use, i was haveing a hard time makeing smooth lines in ps :P

CMB

This may be wrong but it seems that only illustrator cs2 has the livetrace tool, which makes me sad because I have cs1 and no money. There may be a similar tool but I haven't found it yet.

Eric Chadwick

Photoshop can make a path out of a selection, and IIRC you can adjust the tolerance it uses, which essentially makes the path rounder. Then I think you can just export the AI. Dunno, might work.

snemmy

inkscape has a trace function that will turn a bitmap into vectors. you'd have to play around with the settings a bit but could give you a good start.

http://inkscape.org/

Slum

Flash also has a similar function, called Trace Bitmap.

Honestly though, the results aren't going to be great. It has a really weird smoothing algorithm. Illustrator is probably your best bet.

-Ark-

check this site out, good forums and tutorials aswell. Maing stencils is a great medium, had to take a break from 3d as well to get into more traditional medium, cheers have fun.

http://www.stencilrevolution.com/