Tag: John LeMasney

This was an in-workshop creation for the Inkscape series at Princeton Public Library. We went and found an image of a young woman on Inkscape, and then I showed how to use the pencil tool to use text as a brush in Inkscape. Here are the steps involved:

1. Import a picture with good contrast, of a highly recognizable face or other object. Contrast is key.
2. Using Path/bitmap trace, create a vectorized version of the image and discard or set aside the original photograph.
3. Choose a 50% gray for the bitmap traced vector in your palette and apply it.
4. Type three words using the text tool. I think it’s interesting to use words that represent your subject. For this girl, the attendees chose innocent, young, and pensive. Each piece of text should be about half the size of the earlier piece; Innocent is 100 pt, Young is 50 pt, and pensive is 25 pt, for instance.
5. For each string of text, separately, convert the text to path (shift-ctrl-c), ungroup the resulting paths (ctrl-u), then combine the paths into a single path (ctrl-k).
6. Select your first, largest word (now a path), and copy the path to the clipboard (ctrl-c)
7. select the pencil tool set to Spiro paths, 51% smoothing, and shape: from clipboard.
8. test your pencil to the side of your page. You should now be painting with text.
9. Now, working first with the largest piece of text, paint until you have covered the largest areas of gray in your image. You are essentially tracing and filling the image with the widest strokes first. Avoid the smaller areas as the large brush will be clumsy for that purpose.
10. Copy your next word (path) and move back to your pencil to fill in finer details, being aware of the limits of the amount of detail that you can fit in with this size brush.
11. Finally, copy the smallest word and use the pencil to fill in the finest details. When text covers all of the gray, you are finished your painting work.
12. Select the gray bitmap traced image and move it off of your page, as it is no longer needed.
13. Feel free to add a rectangle behind the image for background color, and to apply color to your text strokes you’ve applied. It helps to make the background a lighter color and the foreground marks you’ve made with the pencil a darker color. The more contrast, the better. In fact, black on white is a fine combination.
14. Extra points if you grab a fabulous color combination from colourlovers.com as the basis for your color scheme. I searched for the keyword innocent to find the palette I used in this sketch. Look for the preview image link on the palette page and download and import the image into Inkscape. Then select the part of the image you wish to apply the color to and use the dropper tool to apply the palette’s colors.

Special thanks to workshop attendees for their inspiration in creating this sketch, and to you for stopping by!

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