Here is a close up image of a little girl. More than anything I was looking to create a screencast to explain how I do these text based portraits in Inkscape. It’s a fun technique with some easy key steps that you’ll see in the video below. Enjoy!
[vodpod id=Video.2964745&w=425&h=350&fv=video%3DstVkxQSkBIR19bRlxZWlpeUlJV]
This is a soft edged form using the blur tools in Inkscape.
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.
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.
This image is based in creative play with the stitch sub paths tool in Inkscape. I discovered that you can create a really fun dimensional effect if you approximate the edges of an object in space as paths and then connect them using the stitch sub paths live path effect. I tried at first to make a profile without a real model to work from, which was okay, but not really believable. I decided to go and find an image of somebody’s facial profile online, the solution to which turned out to be one of the first images I came to, an image of a guy named David Zuckerman. I liked the clean-cut profile and used it, and after I was all done, I went back to get the information to credit the photo and found out that he’s “a computer scientist on Adobe Flash Builder team leading the work on language intelligence, refactoring and other IDE goodness” ( ). That’s well… awkward. I wonder if I can talk him into using Open Source software?
So this one is about learning how to use new tools in Inkscape. A Live Path Effect in Inkscape called Von Koch allows you to use a path as a basis for manipulating duplicates in relation to the original. This is a single shape (the central bird) which was shaped essentially to allow for an interlocking effect with its duplicates. A hard tool to explain, but a fun tool to explore. After I was happy, I filled the shapes with color, added a simple face and hair, and then placed a background.
Magna-Tiles Tessellations
Battle Royale: Tetrahedrons vs Tessellations