Hey, all. Here’s a 365 request from a good friend and brilliant thinker, Deep. He sent me a picture of his phone (looks like a Blackjack, but I’m not positive) being attacked by a staple remover, but I decided to focus on just the phone. That’s a really nice aspect of Inkscape, in that you can quickly abstract a photo and remove anything that you don’t want or need without the meticulous selection work often needed to do the same in a bitmap based tool like the GIMP. Different tool for a different purpose, but this is one of the reasons I love Inkscape. I took the original image, bitmap traced it, removed everything but the phone, and then duplicated and blurred the duplicate for the glow effect. I then added a background and placed some pencil marks set to shape: triangle in to give that “shiny” attention effect. I applied the same glow effect on the pencil marks. Thanks for the submission, Deep — that’s a super phone!
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.
Vector and Illustration Advice From a Shutterstock Reviewer
The Beginner’s Guide to Inkscape
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