if memory server me right it was a silent one
re lynda
been around alongtime i been poking my nose in there for quite a few years and i think i have a few of her disks layingaround somewhere
the name of the site isnt that strange:-)
Lynda Weinman, a Web graphics and design veteran, wrote the very first industry book on Web design, Designing Web Graphics, in 1995. She is a prominent educator and the author of dozens of best-selling books. Weinman was a faculty member at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, in 1989, and has worked as an animator and motion graphics director in the film special effects industry.
Weinman has worked as a consultant for Adobe, Macromedia, and Microsoft, and has conducted workshops at Disney, Microsoft, Adobe, and Macromedia. She has been a keynote speaker, moderator, and lecturer at numerous design, animation, Web design, and computer-graphics conferences. Weinman and her husband Bruce Heavin co-founded lynda.com, a training company with headquarters in Ojai, CA, in 1995. She co-founded the Flashforward Conference and Film Festival, the largest Adobe Flash® conference in the world, in 2000.
there are many 3rd party programs that do just the vector conversion
most have a downloadable demo
i think adobe streamline is still the easiest to mess with all considered (or flash)
but each to his own
but one of the things i like about illustrator is that if you do a simple convert
like over a bitmap drawing that doesnt print for snot then have illustrator print it it will do a combination of both and the lousiest of bitmaps jpegs or whatever will print nicely down to the small sizes we need for our scale of working
while i have pretty much mastered all the different types of image transfer using inkjet laser etc most of these software packages do me little good in my major area of involvememnt
and too most of these packages are much smarter than i am and way more powerful than i well ever need for engraving purposes
better to find simple programs that dont have all the overhead bloat and complexity to do just what you need - there in lies the challange!
i can draw/scribe the basic image on in a second or two and then once the carving begins all that is soon lost so it becomes a matter of memory
of course when i fall back to 2d art on ivory or metal I use the computer alot or at least i have a good print to look at sitting on the bench - depends on the subject
somethings i am better at than others - i can do an elephant and african scenery standing on my head but doing big cats requires a little help from the computer at times
its always more difficult doing living creatures as people know when you make mistakes. the hardest animal to render on anything with any software package is the infamous human.
Rod
take a look at inkscape and gimp - approaching illustrator and photo shop
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Graphics/Drawing/
if you have an old apple or mac running os 10 you might want to dump it for linux and start using all these design goodies for free
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwork...ry/l-pmac.html
i am converting over some of my older doggier puters to linux and they run quite well - better than they did with windowz in fact
i went nutz the other day and threw it on a lap top
internet flies considering most net servers are freebsd or linux hosts - not having all that windows code in the way makes things very fast
there are shortcomings with drivers but if you ar cleaver you can work it all out