Adopted EX -A 'BLAM!'

[Hardcoretroubadour]

I'll put this one out here for the tech savvy, anyone used ADobe illustrator or other programs to make collage? I believe it should be possible, but not entirely sure where to start. I am thinking I need to scan the outline of the guitar body and import this into AI as a template somehow, then add images to it? Sonic, Pablo?

[Sonic Mountain]

I'll put this one out here for the tech savvy, anyone used ADobe illustrator or other programs to make collage? I believe it should be possible, but not entirely sure where to start. I am thinking I need to scan the outline of the guitar body and import this into AI as a template somehow, then add images to it? Sonic, Pablo?

Hey, sorry only just notice this. Illustrator is for vector graphics so it's a pain to try and work with scans (which will be bitmaps) best bet would be Photoshop or GIMP. GIMP is free and although I haven't used it, it does a number of the things that photoshop does - for what you want to do it should be fine. Just work at as high as possible resolution to ensure an nice clear print - 300DPI is pretty much minimum for a good print - it may depend on the processing power of your computer how big you can go. Working at 50% might not be a bad idea - if you get it professionally printed they will use a Raster Image Processor to scale it up to the required size - which generally gives better results than trying to scale it up yourself.

Getting the guitar outline into the software at scale is a bit trickier. For the sake of this I would take a photo of the guitar as square on as possible. Make a file where the artboard is the required length and width of the guitar plus 5mm or so. Place the photo on a layer and lock that as a guide. It will not be mm precise for a number of reasons - primarily the distortion caused by the camera lens. But it will be enough to 'ball park' your layout.

You might need to look at having it printed somewhere to make it big enough. You could potentially go to a sign place and have it printed on wrap material like 3M 180C or Comply. Makes it very easy to stick on with no bubbles or creases and we have cleared over the top of it with various products with no problems.