The biggest problem with the Hildebrandt poster is reducing the number of colors to a point where there aren’t a bajillion little pieces and hundreds of colors of fabric. Lucky me, my dad has some good Photoshop skills and came up with a method to take care of that! He started by doing Luke and Leia’s clothing, which has the most shading of anything in the picture.

The quick and dirty method on this one:

  1. Eye-dropper the lightest, darkest, and two “in-between” colors
  2. Gaussian blur at .5 pixels
  3. Save as a .GIF with a custom palette (and a few other settings)

I could TOTALLY try this out on a small scale using the width of my appliqué fusible, which is about 20″ wide (I think) by printing it sideways on a few pieces of printer paper and taping them together.

Finding the right colors should be a snap with this method, too. I hit up ConnectingThreads.com, one of my favorite quilt-shopping sites, and easily found four colors to match:

This is super-exciting! I have a few other projects that need to be finished before I tackle this, but it might be fun to play with just a little piece of this, say Leia’s skirt, but a project of this scale will probably take me about a year to finish :)