Cutting out elements using paths

[jerwin]

I'm a real beginner, both at using this software, and at vector illustration. 

For this project, I'm working with antique pattern magazines. Typically such a magazine would print its patterns on a single sheet of tissue paper, in a confusing mass of overlapping lines-- which would the user would trace out one by one on separate sheets of paper.

 

An example sheet can be found here

http://digital.ub.uni-duesseldorf.de/ihd/periodical/pageview/3103767

 

 

What I would like to do is use  bezier curves to copy pieces of the underlying bitmap-- so that the various grainlines, and reference numbers are preserved-- and then manipulate those pieces like a jigsaw puzzle-- rotating them, translating them, etc. 

 

I am somewhat unfamiliar with the jargon-- so it's quite probable that my scheme has a simple solution that I've overlooked. 

 

 

[firstdefence]

Wow! that's a whole load of lines.  and there is no easy way to translate this image but manually.

Would you want to use the stroke patterns as I see quite a few different designs?  

The stroke is how the lines look, you can change the look of a path by applying different strokes and these strokes don't have to be just a solid black line, you can make them dashed or use an image repeated along the path, these are called image brushes.

Initially, I would use thin coloured strokes to trace over, a red stroke at 0.5pt would work well, you can change the stroke of a path later.

You can organise the paths (we call them curves here) by creating layer groups and renaming the group to something more relevant.

The rest is on you and your patience.

[jerwin]

Here's an earlier attempt. The pattern pieces are filled in curves--and I can rotate and translate them individually. It's just that there are so many individual annotations to draw in-- grainlines, text, etc that I had thought thatI could save time by using masks, or stencils.

 

Edited December 4, 2019 by jerwin

[firstdefence]

The document is very complex and masking wouldn't hide any overlapping pattern and it's respective text. As far as I can see it would have to be manually done including any related text.

It's certainly a challenge.

[v_kyr]

Yes, that looks like a lot of Sisyphean manual work to reproduce that crochet. The antique pattern image side info (of that specific PDF file) gives some hints for an overview here, maybe with a lot of passion those little side part drawings can be redrawn, scaled, line patterned and placed accordingly onto the big picture.

[jerwin]

It's not too bad to start the curves in polygon mode, and then edit the nodes.