I have a question about layered designs. (And let it be known that my artistic ability is the equivalent of a 3 year old with an 8 color box of crayons.)
How do you do them? Do you just start with a picture you want and then delete the foreground stuff for the bottom layer, and then use the same picture and remove the different parts to show different depths and then rinse and repeat until done?
And is there an easier way to do that than hand tracing certain parts?
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Depends on how you want to make it look.
Offsetting paths can go a long way, but can look pretty static. From what I can tell the really ornate ones have a lot of hand manipulation to get it just so. I made a really simple one once just using paths and rotation + offsetting to get a kind of fun effect.
Pics coming soon, one sec.
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And semirelated, here’s one I did way back in the day (Dec 2017, I’d only had the GF for like a month):
So yeah, in the end when I did larger mandalas, I decided to buy them, because while they were cool the process of making them was going to be incredibly fiddly and I was interested in the end result more than the process.
these guys:
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Thanks. Yeah…those are cool and I might start with something like that to get my eyes used to thinking in 3d. My original thought was something like the Catalog design Autumn Days Layered Window Picture | Glowforge
and then progressing from there to these things people do with big scenes inside cowboy shapes or whatever.
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Ah right. Well for that, if you’ve got a clear vision of your scene it’s just a matter of making each layer separately and then putting them in a common border.
Easier said than done, of course, but in theory it’s pretty straightforward use of a lot of booleans, yeah?
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I wonder the same thing every time I see those papercut shadow boxes. I think it takes a lot of brain power to separate in your mind what you want on each later to create a crazy scene like that. Courtesy of Google-someday I hope to make one even half as nice:
I need another lifetime to gain those art skills. This was my only “layered” project. And it’s definitely not what you’re after.
@odzicari’s layered stuff is really cool. I like looking at those projects.
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For this one, I started with a line drawing and spent several hours working out how I wanted the face structured in 3D space. I had a bottom layer of my Inkscape file with the full drawing, then each physical layer had its own layer in the file the I could turn on and off to see how the design built up.
I spent a lot of time copying and pasting parts of the face from one layer to another until I was happy with the final product!
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lol…All of those are lovely. I can’t even do the doll house.
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You’re my hero. 
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That’s how I did my mini house. 
I just couldn’t explain it.
Also…a lot of trial and error on the layers, because the furniture looked weirdly unproportionate if I didn’t get it right. I think the bed and chairs were too skinny until I added another layer, the kitchen counter was too big, the books were hard to see with two extra shelf layers…I had so many scraps layers afterwards. I just thought of the 3D objects built up layer by layer, attached to the main frame.
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I’ve been trying to get my head around this stuff as well, I finally managed to do a layered design and I think that now the penny has dropped I will be able to do more of the simple kind like this one.
After I did this one I was looking at some vector silhouette art online and wish I had looked at that in the first place.
I did this one from a photo, the actual building is in the town where I’m from in England. It’s hard to see in the pic but this has 5 layers, made a bunch of mistakes of course - good learnings for next time!
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These are completely mind-blowing aren’t they! Your doll house is lovely!
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Wow! I used the same technique on mine so its good to get that affirmation!
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Hm. York?
Trying to guess your location from the building style 
I grew up in Buckinghamshire 
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This is a very good guess! I’m from a town just outside Manchester called Worsley. This building is called The Packet House and it’s on the Bridgewater Canal, this view of it is from the water.
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I like this. It has a simple, yet elegant feel.
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Thank you!
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That’s very cool. What kind of wood did you use? It looks like cedar.
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Yup, cedar!
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I love cedar! The color, the smell. I have a pile of it right now in the garage just waiting to be turned into something awesome. 
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