Space Invader Vinyl Cutouts

I made these vinyl cutouts at TechShop San Francisco using their computer controlled vinyl cutter.  TechShop is this awesome place (only available in select cities) where you pay a monthly fee to get access to a bunch of tools, including this vinyl cutter.  These particular patterns are fairly simple, and if you were really patient and precise, you could probably make these using just a knife and a ruler, but the vinyl cutter is way easier.

These are cut out of sheets of vinyl material, sticky on the back, sold for $2 per foot at TechShop, which is pretty affordable for almost any design.

Step 1 Create the design

I used Adobe Illustrator (also available at TechShop) to trace the Space Invader sprites in this sprite sheet from deviantART.  I've attached the sprite sheet for reference.  You could probably trace these by hand in Illustrator pretty fast, but I used the Live Trace feature to convert a scaled up copy of the sprites I wanted into vectors.  The procedure was:

Adobe Photoshop:
    * Cut out desired sprites
    * Invert image so that sprites are black instead of white
    * Scale them up (like 500%) with a nearest neighbor resampling
    * Copy and paste into Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator:
   * Live Trace->Tracing Options
        Path Fitting: 0.1px
        Corner Angle: 85
        Mode: Black and white
        Ignore White: Checked
        Click the Trace button
    * Live Trace->Expand
    * Clean up artifacts and incorrect lines