How to make Obama hope poster style in inkscape?

Like this:

With alot of manual working with the pen tool
or by auto-tracing a photograph with multiple scans, six colours,
and then using one of the paths to clip a striped object.
Probably to start off you can have a better idea by using gimp, trying out different tone curves on an image.

i think its a mixture of techniques
you need to prepare your original image in Gimp with Contrast, Levels adjustments or G'MIC filters like smooth [bilateral]
saulgoode's Quantize script may be useful as well (mixture of posterize and indexed image effect) (http://www.gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=8726)
and David Tschumperle wrote the Cutout Filter on my request for G'MIC (http://www.gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=10459)

when your image is prepared in such a way, you can load it in Inkscape and begin drawing paths around the shapes
or trace it, but i think doing it by hand is better because finding the right shapes is still something thats need to be made with an artist's eye

here are two tutorials i find quite useful and enlightening

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cye3VaLo0Go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9HXQydOmMo


also you can get a similar effect in Gimp by using layermasks
if you are interested i can explain that in greater detail

Can you explain in detail about getting a similar effect in Gimp using layermasks. Thanks guys for helping me out. Any other ideas are welcome.

Click on the image to download the original xcf.



The lowest layer was made first, each above one was made later.

Henry432 wrote:Can you explain in detail about getting a similar effect in Gimp using layermasks. Thanks guys for helping me out. Any other ideas are welcome.

i think what Mr. Lazur posted is a pretty good example
its the same technique i would use


if you need ideas for making different stripes, you can have a look at my blog here:

http://gimp-science-labs.blogspot.de/20 ... ation.html

Amazing blog! Thanks.

I was experimenting again and here is something i came up with.

You add layermasks from a grayscalecopy in Gimp and apply various levels of Threshold, then use the image as a blueprint to trace with the Bezier Tool in Inkscape.

EDIT: dayum, just realized, its basically what Lazur already posted.....