This one was pretty straightforward — I found a picture of a cat, and in Inkscape I began to overlay path-converted ellipses and other marks, then shaped them with the node tool in order to make them match the shapes of the photo. Added a simple foresty background. Finalized with some touches of color, along with whiskers made with the pencil tool set to shape: triangle in.
Here’s another text based portrait, and in this case a self portrait. For this technique, I start by placing a photo in Inkscape, and doing a bitmap trace. Then, I place a string of text, convert it to a path, copy it, and use the pencil tool with shape set to “from clipboard“. Then, I draw until the dark shapes from the bitmap trace are filled, at which point I remove the trace, leaving just the text. Underneath is simply a rectangle of contrasting color.
Date: Monday, January 11th, 2010
Venue: Highlands Regional Library Consortium at Hasbrouck Heights Library.
Abstract: In this day-long workshop, we’ll go in depth to discover how to use two fantastic Open Source Design Applications: the GNU Image Manipulation Program (AKA GIMP), and Inkscape.
The GIMP provides layers, effects, painting tools, and all of the features that you have come to expect from a fully featured imaging application like Adobe Photoshop. Inkscape is a vector-based illustration and layout application, similar to Adobe Illustrator in its ability to manipulate text, shapes, paths, vector points, and colors. Because these programs are Open Source Software, you benefit from the work of thousands of volunteer and professional developers, without having to pay anything for the use of the software. In this workshop, you will learn to use these tools by doing a few projects step-by-step. By the end of this workshop you will be able to effectively use painting and drawing tools, brushes, layers, path manipulation, photo manipulation, effects, rulers and grids to meet against your most challenging design needs.
Presentation: http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0Ad-YsRMv5bPqZGNrZm05ZndfMTU1ZHY3cnJoZmQ&hl=en
Commentary and notes:
This is just a quick sketch in Inkscape of some clip art girl. With a tablet, and the Calligraphy tool, this kind of work is quick and rewarding.
This was the result of me playing with the Render: Spirograph extension in Inkscape. When I first made the Spirograph, I saw the central opening as a mouth, and created a tongue, and some very simple eyes to make some sort of monster. Not really satisfied, I thought it looked a bit like a pig. I decided to push the idea by applying piggish colors, adding tweaked triangles for ears, defining the eyes a bit more, and shaping the snout with ellipses. I added the fade in the muddy background to create a bit of depth and story. I’m really enjoying learning about all of the deeper features in Inkscape — I usually would stick to the tools on the side, but I’m getting a lot out of the LPE tools, the extensions, and path tweaking.
This one is not about faces, stitched paths, or much else — it’s just about a cool feature. One of the extensions in Inkscape aloows you to create barcodes in 6 or 7 popular formats. QR codes are absent from the list, but this one (128) scans with my Android phone too. I’d like to combine this with one of the other recent techniques, like the liner volumetric faces, and see where that goes.
