The bushman hunt
By: Precious Siisa and Emma Kuloba- Hawthorne-Scribner High School, Bududa Uganda
Hey everyone! Emma and I wanted to share a project we just finished in our Innovations class at Hawthorne Scribner High School. We wanted to create a scene of the African savanna hunt, and we’re proud of how the final piece turned out!
Our process started with searching online for the perfect images. We downloaded a few different elements: a leaping antelope, native savanna grass, trees, and the iconic figure of the Bushman with his bow and arrow from the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy”.
Once we had our images, we brought them into Inkscape. First, we used the Trace Bitmap feature to get clean, sharp outlines from the photos. After that we used the Simplify tool to smooth out the paths and reduce the number of nodes.
After saving our outlines as .dxf files, we imported the files into Silhouette Studio and sent them to our Portrait 3 die cutter.
We picked out different colored cardstock for each specific element to give the piece some depth—green for the grass, grey for the trees, brown for the bushman, and a bright yellow for the sun. After the Portrait 3 cut out all our pieces, we glued the layers together onto an orange background.
It took a lot of patience and teamwork to get everything lined up perfectly, but we love the final 3D effect.