SO, you all probably thought I vanished into a different psychic
dimension, since my letterboxing activities have diminished
(temporarily, at least). But here I am again, with another newly
planted letterbox.

Sleep,Drunken Bacchus...! is part of the Wine Country invitational
series and the link, for now, is:
http://www.letterboxing.org/BoxView.asp?
boxnum=12210&boxname=Sleep,_Drunken_Bacchus...
I'll reformat the clues into a web page that I'll host, later.

This letterbox has a hinged stamp, much like Star-Crossed. Both of
the stamps have images derived from oil paintings. Star-Crossed is
from a painting by the Spanish painter, Murillo, and Caravaggio's
painting of a youthful Bacchus is what I worked from for this stamp.
I carved both stamps at roughly the same time.

Working from prints of paintings (and not from clip art) requires
breaking down the full range of color values in the painting into the
solid black-and-white areas needed to carve from. I create the
stamp's artwork by using my eyes, a 3B pencil, tracing and grid
papers, and squinting at times to help decide whether a value in an
area becomes black or not. There are always ambiguous areas that you
need to fake a bit and re-work.

There isn't a shortcut to sort and translate the colors that I'm
aware of, other than scanning and using Photoshop's "Stamp" filter,
which wouldn't give the same look. I think Photoshop works well for
photos, but paintings generally don't strive for the precise
verisimilitude that photos have. [Hey! Get the dictionary instead of
ignoring that big word!].

Has anyone else worked from prints of paintings? What method do you
use? Any shortcuts?

Some day, I may work out how to hinge stamps to have more than 1
fold, and with more than 1 brace...
[then hide the boxes underwater, with word-y narrative-style trivia
word puzzle clues in a weird font, using a character substitution-
based code that'll require a deciphering device puzzle ... JUST
KIDDING, FOLKS!]

Oh, and BTW, in the spirit of Nepenthe, let me make certain that
everyone knows that Bacchus is a Roman god, and not a Greek god...
but he does reside within sight of a certain Greek goddess'letterbox,
and she's part of the Wine Country series, too!

Ciao!
Pablo in SF