John LeMasney (lemsy) is an artist, graphic designer, and technology creative. He is located in beautiful Nelson County, VA, but works remotely with ease. Contact him at: lemasney@gmail.com to discuss your next creative project.
This design, with help from Sarah Klockars-Clauser (photo © Sarah Klockars-Clauser for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike) was done by using the technique in the following screencast , the first ever on 365sketches. It makes use of the Trace Bitmap tool, the gradient tool, and the import function. Enjoy!
[vodpod id=Video.2912153&w=425&h=350&fv=] If the image is too small, visit the full sized video at
This is a soft edged form using the blur tools in Inkscape.
This image was created by overlapping several ellipses, which I love as a technique for creating bubbly forms. I selected them all and did a Path/Union operation to make a single bubbly path. Then I duplicated the cloud and did a path/outset, and colored it yellow then added a blur. I duplicated that and outset it again, making it red, but not adding a blur. I used the text tool to add a couple of commas and a parenthetical which I manipulated with the selection tool to form a face. I added a blue sky in the background and called it done. It’s definitely a retro feeling thing.
Like many people my age (I’m 36 this year), I’m a huge fan of the original Star Wars Trilogy, and although I didn’t despise the prequels like many others, I didn’t enjoy them as much as the originals. I remember being in the theater when I first saw this tiny two legged walker run across the screen in Empire, still reeling from the AT-ATs. Making this in Inkscape is just a matter of finding and importing a good clear picture of the subject, and adding some text elements to the canvas with the text tool that you can then easily “paint” with using the selection-stamp (space) method. I worked from head to toe matching pieces of text to the shapes in the image, rotating, stretching, skewing, and resizing wherever necessary to really define the outline, while at the same time keeping the image simple enough to clearly see the textual elements. It’s a slow process, but very rewarding when you are finished.
This guy is ready for some low class, slimy, slicked back action. He just got done hanging out on the corner, and figured it was time to find some other way to get up to no good. I made a lot of use of Inkscape‘s clone tool here — I made essentially one ear (an ellipse to path), one curl of hair (a spiral to path), and one eye (a rectangle to path with a live path effect curve and a node edited bump for a pupil). His head is a manipulated rectangle to path. His shoulders and undershirt are the same. His mustache, ‘beard’, mouth, nose, ear hole, and slicked back sides are all quick pencil marks. I finished with a multi stop gradient in the background, and I duplicated the hipster, performed conversions of all of the shapes, clones and other elements to paths, then did a union which I blurred a bit and colored for a slight glow effect. Hella fun.
This is one of my favorite exercises — manipulating text by placing, overlapping, flipping, sizing and rotation to apparently form some other object, especially easy using the text and selection tools found in Inkscape. Fonts are art in and of themselves. Using this technique really celebrates the beautiful joints of well designed fonts. In this case, I made a teddy bear using the characters O, 3, E, ), D, and C. The only forms which are not text are the claws, which probably shouldn’t be on a teddy bear anyway. Oh, bother.