Blue bokeh – John LeMasney
So, in an earlier sketch (dark green bokeh), I used Inkscape’s Tiled Clones feature to create a Bokeh effect, though at the time, I myself was less than impressed with what I came up with, and knew that I’d be coming back to it to make an improvement, which i feel like I’ve achieved here. I love Bokeh images, and in a camera, they’re generally created by having distinct backlight sources that are far out of focus while having a foreground subject or space that is in focus. In this particular case, I was creating a scene that focused on just the out of focus back light sources. Here, we might be looking at a building with lots of bright reflections in the distance, or water on a large lake on a sunny day, but in general, I think Bokeh are magical, mystical, and beautifully abstract.
With the beta of Inkscape 0.48, many people have been hard at work bringing new features to Inkscape. One of the most exciting differences for me between 0.47 and 0.48 is the brand new spraypaint tool, which allows you to take a single object or group of objects and quickly recreate them as a stream of overlapping clones, as though you had a spray can filled with a shape. You can affect the size, rotation, and other aspects of the copies or clones that you create with the tool, and it does a great job of injecting random placement into your design.
This tool was made (amongst many other uses) for just this kind of sketch. In Inkscape, I created a blue background rectangle, then I placed a single white ellipse and set it to 50% opacity. Then, using the spraypaint tool, I clicked and dragged the ellipse, which created a series of randomly placed clones at different sizes as I moved the tool about the canvas. It quickly created a randomness for the bokeh that worked nicely. I also used Inkscape’s tweak tool to affect the hue, brightness, and opacity of the shapes. Finally, I selected a few of the shapes at a time and increased blur at varying levels.
A very fun, very quick way to create this effect in Inkscape. Thanks to @JonCruz, @Scislac, and the rest of the Inkscape developers for a great upcoming release.
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