So in a followup to yesterday’s post, here is @suzieprof again, showing her true feelings for Mondays. Her face was bitmap traced. The clouds are simply unioned ellipses. The rainfall is made up of paths with dotted lines set to long-short-long-short. There are ellipses below to indicate splashes.
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.
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!
I really enjoy Inkscape’s ability to take a single path and use it as a brush with the pencil tool. I do this all the time. I was walking along a path, looking at some very tall, old trees, and was thinking about how I might use a single thin tree in order to build up and flash out a larger tree. I tried it and it didn’t work very well. However, in the same experiment, I came up with this, where I used 2 or 3 different tree bitmaps, converted them to vector using the trace bitmap tool, then copied one to the clipboard, which allows it to be drawn out as a brushusing the pencil tool set to shape: clipboard. The moon is a white ellipse, the text has the candy coating technique, and the trees have a blurred white duplicate for a glow effect. Hope you enjoy it!
So here, I wanted to play some more with text and the pencil tool. I started by typing in the word Jungle, converting it to path, and sizing it up to be readable at 500px. Then I took the pencil tool, set as usual to shape: triangle in with spiro splines and 50% smoothing, and added vine-like shapes to the ends of each of the butts of the letterforms, to extend them. I performed a union on all of the letterforms and vine shapes, so that they all became one path, and cleaned up the joints between the letter ends and the vine beginnings. After I was satisfied with the shape, I set the color, duplicated it, and outset it twice, sending the outset path back and giving it a brighter green. I did this once again, making that outset path light yellow, with a slight blur for a glow effect.
Satisfied with the forms, I decided to create a leaf motif in the corner, which is simply an ellipse converted to path and shaped gently into a leaf form with the node tool. I added a vein to the leaf with the pencil tool using the same settings as above. I grouped those two paths into a single leaf and stem, then duplicated the leaf several more times. I created another full opacity leaf for the foreground, and many others in the background, altering the size and rotation to create a pile of leaves. I set the opacity of the background leaves to 40% or so, to let them fade into the background.
This image was meant to be a rendering of a memory of sultry summer mornings where the heat of the coming day meets the wetness in tall grass and makes for a bit of fog. I made a single leafy reed with the ellipse tool and the calligraphy tool, then set it as a brush by copying it and using the pencil tool set to shape: from clipboard. I added some tall grasses with the pencil tool set to shape: triangle in. I applied a color jitter to all of the shapes after setting them to a solid dark leafy green. I added a blurry gradient for the background, and a blurry dark green rectangle in the foreground to add some depth. I added the text, dupliacted it and blurred the duplicate for a soft foggy effect. With snow on the way here in New Jersey, I’m looking forward to seeing the summer morning fog again.
Inkscape Projects
