oldzort

Thanks for all of your help, I tried each of your methods and then picked from each. I learned so much. A couple of comments about each if I may: MJW- Median didn't seem to do anything at first. I then realized that I had resized my working image so that it would upload, after I reduced the colors to just 6, your technique seemed to work Ishi-I loved that 1px Expansion. At first it didn't seem to do much but when I zoomed in it is pretty cool that it increases everything by 1 pixel in each direction (I think). It did seem to do a little distortion in the purple and of course by increase size got some of his blue dots a little out of position, I just moved them a little afterwards Ego Eram Reputo-Thanks for suggesting the Alpha Space plugin, it works very well. I liked edge expander except I kept losing the yellow center of the flower with it. Again, thanks for all of your help and I appreciate how thorough your instructions were. I hope my experience will help someone else that faces a similar issue. One of the most valuable things I learned is that zooming in (all the way in) really lets you see what these plug-in do.

A little background on what I am attempting to accomplish. When my 5 year-old grandson makes a drawing, I am tasked with scanning the picture, cleaning it up, resizing it, converting it to an embroidery file so that my wife can use her embroidery machine to sew the drawing on a "curtain" for display and memories. I use paint.net (obviously) to clean up and resize the drawing; however, I am very new to paint.net. I understand most of the basic tools but I am very inexperienced at some of the more powerful features. He recently drew a picture of a flower (attached); however the size of the lines in the drawing are too narrow to embroider well. They are about a brush width of 25 and need to be at least 45 for the embroidery to look good. I have tried a couple of methods both of witch kind of work but are very time consuming. Method 1 was to simply trace around his drawing with the paintbrush set to a width of 45. This keeps the general shape of his drawing but loses a lot of his originality Method 2 was to duplicate his drawing in a separate layer, shrink it a bit, then in another layer enlarge it a bit and finally move parts up and down and left and right to enlarge the shape. I was hoping someone could tell me how to accomplish this task in a better manner. I am assuming the instruction might be more advanced than I am so please give me as much detail as possible. Thank you very much