Tag: Inkscape

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65 of 365 is a prevail whale made in #inkscape

Prevail Whale 2
Prevail Whale 2

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!

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63 of 365 is a vast, quiet moonrise in #inkscape

Moonrise
Moonrise

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!

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62 of 365 is an outright breech of Pixar’s copyright in #inkscape

Wall-E
Wall-E

So, anybody’s who has ever met my 5 year old son Jack probably knows about his affection for the main character in the Pixar film named Wall-E. He draws the robot in a very stylized way (his rendering reminds me of the style in the credits sequence at the end of the movie) over and over again, and has gone through reams of paper telling stories and working out scenarios in which Wall-E does this or that, and I absolutely love it. It reminds me of my childhood in which I spent a good part of every day drawing soldiers in battles, futuristic cities, helicopters, cars and even tiny pictograms.  I hope drawing becomes a lifelong friend for him as it has been for me.

With apologies to Pixar, the drawing is from memory (the movie has a permanent place in our Roku’s Netflix Watch Now queue) and I take great liberty with the specifics of the character, such as placement of lines, etc. He’s made mostly with the rectangle tool, with some ellipses and Beziers in some places. Gradients were applied to give some character to the surface. Some text was added.

In the interest of getting Jack familiar with other tools for drawing besides media on paper, I’ve begun to give him access to Inkscape and have taken a quiet supervisory approach, waiting for him to get stuck in his experimentation, showing him how to move on, sometimes giving little tips to help him get started. In general, I try to let him play and experiment as he wishes. At any rate, this drawing is for him. I love you, Jack!

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portfolio requests

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
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
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.

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58 of 365 is a jungle of vines and leaves in #Inkscape

Jungle of vines and leaves by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Jungle of vines and leaves by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

 

Jungle of vines and leaves by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Jungle of vines and leaves by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

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.

 

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56 of 365 is changing from a pencil to a quill in #inkscape

From a pencil to a quill - LeMasney Consulting
From a pencil to a quill - LeMasney Consulting
From a pencil to a quill - LeMasney Consulting
From a pencil to a quill – LeMasney Consulting

 

From a pencil to a quill - LeMasney Consulting
From a pencil to a quill – LeMasney Consulting

I was inspired to make something that reminded me of President’s day. When I think of Washington, I think quills, and when I think of Lincoln, I think of pencils, though they both had both. I can’t explain why, this is just what came to me. So this one is all about the interpolation extension (extensions/generate from path/interpolate) which takes two paths and creates intermediate shapes that show how one shape turned into another shape. It’s great for creating animations, but also for illustration. For instance, you can take two related objects (like a pencil and a quill) and have them connected by a series of shadowy shapes. So, in order to do this, I created a pencil by hand with the Bezier tool, and then created a gradient that described what we’d expect to see on a pencil (yellow paint, woody tip, lead, eraser). I also found a nondescript image of a feather, brought it in and took a duplicate of the pencil and shaped that into the quill. For that gradient, I created a feather like set of transitions. I then applied the Interpolate extension to create the tweening. Really just an experiment for me here, but I can see using this in other situations, for sure.

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