Home » By Sound Salon, Inlay, Lessons » Inlay part 1
Start by tracing out the object to be inlayed.
Whether it’s a bridge, fingerboard, headstock, etc., you can make a simple line drawing to work out your design on. It is handy to photocopy the line drawing for future use.
After sketching out the inlay design, I take a few digital photos of it with a ruler, or calipers to gauge its actual size, while working with the design on the computer.
I import the images to my computer, and open them in Adobe Photoshop for editing. Basically any image software with the ability to use “layers” will work. Layers allow you to trace over an existing image without altering it, and also save the tracing as a separate image.
My goal at this point is to clean up the look of the drawing, and emulate what the final inlay will look like.
All of these steps can be done on paper, but I prefer “undo”ing to erasers. If you’re a fan of analog, simply substitute “layers” for tracing paper, and “printing” to photocopying.
After creating a new layer in Photoshop, I start to redraw the inlay sections. This will be a high contrast inlay so there are a lot of shadows and highlights.
Once I get the inlay design looking exactly how I want, I start tracing over the section edges with the Photoshop “Pen Tool”. This will create vector path that I can export, and print out as a super fine outline using Adobe Illustraitor, or any other program that supports .ai vectors.
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