This is my friend Craig Smith’s dog Stanley combined with an airliner, bringing down delicious doggy goodness in the form of bones. Thanks to Craig for sharing his photos and giving me the inspiration. Inkscape makes it easy — I took Stanley and did a bitmap trace and then took the airliner and did a bitmap trace. I removed all of Stanley but his face, and I removed the body of the jet. I overlapped them, and created some goggles with ellipses, complete with lenses (low opacity fill). I created a single bone using the rectangle tool and ellipse tool, and then duplicated resized and rotated the bones to appear to be the payload. I used the calligraphy tool set to “splotchy” and low opacity to create the cloud shapes. The land and sky are a single gradient on the background rectangle. I recreated Stanley’s ears with the calligraphy tool set to a thick brush.
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!
A wild jumping sailfish by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #inkscape #cc #drawing #design
A wild jumping sailfish by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #inkscape #cc #drawing #design
So, the origin of this was another 365 Request from my very good (and highly missed) friend Rob. He suggested:
“Sailfish jumping out of the water with the sun setting would be neat to see. Esp…ecially how you masterfully craft amazing images. Two to help get started, pictures: live: probably my favorite http://tinyurl.com/sailfishJump “
And so, I looked at the images, did some research of my own on Sailfish, and found some very interesting clinical creative commons licensed images. The one I settled on was at in which the sailfish is depicted in a removed, scientific style — the actual image (attributed to fishbase.com) is at and was a good place to start for the manipulation I had in mind.
So, I took the image and did a bitmap trace, which worked beautifully, and then I applied a “bend” live path effect to simulate the arc in the body that I saw in Rob’s picture and others. In order to give the fish body and depth, I used the watercolor technique of wide strokes of washy, transparent color with the calligraphy tool underneath the bitmap trace. I used a gradient to create the sea and sky, and then created some wild splashing with the same watercolor technique described above.
Thanks, Rob for the inspiration, and thanks to you for stopping by.
So this image is a very specific request from a good friend of mine, Angel. She’s been paying attention to the blog for a while, and she noticed when I had a call for requests. She sent a couple of tutorials, and a very specific set of instructions, which I tried to do faithfully:
Here’s my pic. My mission, if you choose to accept ;-): Make a vector illustration in a watercolor style. Leave color pallet the same as original picture. Then create bling text underneath the portrait that says “Pink”. Choose any style you like for the background. I will post two tutorials that show what I have in mind. Thanks!
One thing I especially love is that both of these tutorials were specifically written for Adobe Illustrator, which might lead the casual observer that they can’t be performed in another tool, but the ideas and skills were easily translatable for Inkscape, cause it’s just so damn rockin’.
So, as the tutorials explain, I created a pattern out of pink triangles and on a black background, I applied it to text, then duplicated/outset, and duplicated/blurred the text for an outline and a glow. I applied a multi step gradient to the outline.
Then, i took Angel’s image into the GIMP where I pushed the contrast and brightness for the cleanest trace. I tried once or twice with my trackpad to do a trace by hand, but without my tablet handy, it wasn’t doing her justice. I decided to go halfsies with the second tutorial and just do a linear bitmap trace. I then applied the watercolor technique by using the calligraphy tool set to low opacity and various shades that matched the photo palette as Angel requested. I varied the size of the brush, though again, the tablet would have done wonders here.
Finally, I added the word snowpocalypse to commemorate the background of the original image which was a mound of snow from the snowstorm of February 2010 which laid down about 2 feet over a couple of days in these parts.
I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have submitted materials and ideas for the sketches, and especially Angel who I’ve co-generated a lot of design ideas with over the years. She rocks the ink like an Apocalyse Pink.
This is another entry in the 365 Requests sub project. Sam, a very good friend from my high school days who I’ve been lucky enough to stay in touch with, donated a robot image of his, which is the basis of the hearts with hands down the left side of the image. I saw a recent image of his on his profile that I thought captured his personality in a great way — he’s a lot of fun, witty, mischievous, a character, and all heart. He just enjoyed the birth of a son, and I am thrilled for that kid — he’s going to know what it’s like to have a great dad (and mom, brothers, aunt, etc. — the whole clan is a great one). So, I took Sam’s image, converted to botmap, removed all the nodes except what was essential to convey his expression, and gave it some color. I created a background square, and on top of that added a slightly blurred spirograph render using that extension. I added the text, an obvious nod to Dr. Suess, but also a play on Sam’s playfulness. I decided to bring out the color in his eyes, by creating two paths and shaping them into where his irises would appear, because he’s got these incredibly deep blue eyes. Finally, to make sure I honored his donation, I took his robot image, cut the path to get at the heart and arms of the robot from his image, combined them into a mechanized heart, and duped twice. Thanks to Sam for his donation, and thanks to you for checking it out.
This image is of a very good friend of mine, and is part of the 365 requests subproject. As a matter of fact, it was this request (from another good and mutual friend) that inspired me to open up the offer to participate to all of my friends and acquaintances by asking them to send in ideas and photos for the purposes of inspiring sketches. In this particular case, this sketch was meant to be a birthday gift for the person in the image. She knows who she is. As far as you’re concerned, you just need to know that she’s wholly dedicated to inspiring young teachers to go out and make great changes in the world. I’m very proud to know her. The technique: I took a rather small resolution image and bitmap traced it, then I resized it up. I added some color fields to denote a shirt and face. I placed gradients to indicate hair and jacket. I duplicated the bitmap trace, sent it backwards, and blurred it for a glow effect. I added the word teach, and added a glow effect for that as well. Finally, as a background, I created a solid block, added a extension: render: polar grid and blurred it to create a sunburst effect. Happy accidents in this one.
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