Prevail Whale 2
For those of you who use Twitter, you have likely seen the Fail Whale, which shows up whenever the system is beyond capacity or encountering some other issue that ceases service. It’s a beautiful, fun design, and I think of it as being akin to a creative 404 error page, or a really peppy upbeat quirky hold music playlist. At any rate,a long time ago, I made a play on this design called the prevail whale, one of the few times I had some serious kudos action on my Flickr account. I decided to update my design to move further away from the look and feel of the original Fail Whale, and display a bit more of Inkscape‘s capability. The Prevail Whale works against the things that try to hold it back, fighting against fail, and having fun while doing it. It’s my personal mascot for social media.
Lots of techniques were used here. The waves are a Bezier tool construction, duplicated and extended several times. I used a dotted line for the stroke, and various sea toned colors for the waves. The birdies were just a simple ellipse and rectangle construction, joined, then tweaked with the node tool. Once I liked one, I duplicated and positioned them, grouped them, and applied a gradient to all of them simultaneously. The cloud and sun are techniques I’ve done here before. In this case, there is a glow on the sun, and a dotted line for the sun’s stroke. The whale is constructed from an ellipse, a triangle, and some other curved shapes, all thoroughly tweaked, joined, and worked to be continuous. I applied a gradient, to create a whale like skin tone. The eye is a series of ellipses, made very much like I might make a human eye. The tongue was maybe the hardest piece in the whole piece, as I had to shape, reshape, and tweak to make it feel right. The eyebrow is a pencil set to shape: triangle out. The tiny tiny teeth took a while — about 200 clicks with the Bezier tool, meticulously placed to get that great tiny tooth effect. I applied a glow to the whale by duplicating, setting yellow, and blurring. The blowhole spray was a quick kidney bean shape with the Bezier tool, with translucency added, and some dots made with the pencil’s ctrl-click to dots technique . It was a great deal of fun to make, and as always, I thank you for taking a look!
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