The hard part of turning colorful illustration art into physical wall pieces is not saving a file with an SVG extension. It is creating closed, clean, nonoverlapping contours that CAD can import and extrude. A raster image can look perfectly sharp on screen while containing gradients, anti-aliasing and little islands that become terrible 3D-printable parts. Inkscape’s built-in Potrace-based tracing tool gives you a free way to tackle the vector stage deliberately.
Begin with a copy of the original artwork and decide which colors should become distinct printed pieces. Simplify the palette first, but do not flatten the whole image to a single silhouette. Trace one color or tonal region at a time; inspect the resulting paths and delete specks that are too small to manufacture. Use as few paths as possible while preserving important features such as facial outlines, clothing folds and high-contrast details. The goal is not a photorealistic trace; it is a controlled set of closed profiles.
The Inkscape documentation explicitly warns that automatic tracing produces curves to work with, not a finished duplicate of the artwork. That is a useful distinction after failed one-click conversions. In the editor, zoom in on intersections, remove overlapping duplicate boundaries, and simplify excessive nodes before exporting plain SVG. Import a tiny test subset into Plasticity before spending time cleaning every layer. If the test cannot make valid planar regions, repair the contours there instead of forcing a broken projection or Boolean downstream.
For the assembled print, give each color its own thickness and consider a backing board with shallow pockets or alignment pins. Those assembly decisions can be designed in Plasticity after the SVG is trustworthy. The experiment is free, reversible, and much more informative than paying for another black-box vectorizer without understanding its output.
The measurable success criterion is simple: one illustration, perhaps five to ten major color shapes, cleanly imported into Plasticity as usable curves. Only then should the full wall piece be laid out for printing.