Just in case anyone wonders whats involved in generating a sticker from something like a picture, I snapshotted some of the development stages from something I'm doing just now.
In this case I started off with a small gif file (thanks Sanjoy
). It's easier than a photo in some ways as a photo needs manipulated until it looks straight, but with any small image like this, image quality is an issue. So you expand it out to a size that your comfotable working with lines, and then build a frame of guide lines based around the primary lines of the image. Your trying to recover, out of the blurred image, the original structure given to the logo by the designer, not simply copying the points in the image itself as that often gives inaccurate results as it may have been through several conversions that have added error along the way. You've all seen stickers that just aren't consitent in their structure or layout to be convincing as originals, I'm aiming (achieving is something differnt lol ) to make it so you can't tell.
Once you have your framework you can then trace the lines. This just takes a bit of experience to know what kind of line or how to manipulate lines to get them in the right place. You trace the image sticking to your guidelines but using the image as a reference. After the trace you then need to remove the original image and see if it looks "right" on it's own then make some small adjustments to make sure the "rightness" emerges from the trace, always refering back to the graphic.
All told this is about 2 hours work to get it to a state I'm happy with, but this is a basic sticker others take longer, and then do some file translation to make it ready to cut.
edited to correct some dreadful late night spelling...
