Observatory on a Hill
So this was inspired again by my five year old son Jack, who loves looking at the sky and learning about space. Right now he’s been very interested in the Mars Rovers, amongst some other things, like volcanoes, deep sea caves, and the Iron Giant. At any rate, he’s an explorer, and recently, as we were drawing together, he showed me that he was drawing an observatory. Of late, as he has been drawing, he has reminded me of a great truth, at least in my life: kids know how to draw. There’s no pretension, no theory. just a rendering of imagination. Jack draws beautifully. This drawing was made in Inkscape, starting with a node tool tweaked rectangle for the hill, the same for the body of the observatory, its windows, door, and the sky. The dome was created with the ellipse tool, and the lens with opening used the pencil tool set to shape: triangle in, the rectangle tool, the ellipse tool, and the gradient tool. The moon is an ellipse with gradient, along with another ellipse that was clipped with path/intersection with a different gradient. The stars were made with the shape tool, along with the pencil tool and the ctrl-click method to produce dots. Finally, I thought that if I was walking up a hill to an observatory, there would likely be a path, so I made a winding path, and set the line to dotted.
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