Here is a close up image of a little girl. More than anything I was looking to create a screencast to explain how I do these text based portraits in Inkscape. It’s a fun technique with some easy key steps that you’ll see in the video below. Enjoy!
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This is an imitation in Inkscape of bokeh, or the effect of light when a lens is out of focus. Following is a link to a video demonstrating how I did it, with what I think is a nice overview of the Inkscape Tiled Clones Tool.
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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 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.
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.
Pushing my quota for absurdity in this series, I decided to use Inkscape today in order to do some collage work. By taking three images from MorgueFile.com (a little girl looking over a wall, a made-up eye, and a mouth full of braces) and bitmap tracing them, I was able to make this happy little cyclops. The most work was done to remove the nodes from the originals in order to make way for the layering of the new elements, such as taking out the original face of the little girl. I masked off part of the mouth with braces, to get rid of the hard edges from the original photo.
