I’m very proud of this sketch. It’s one that I feel succeeds in color, in tone, and in pictorial illustration, but beyond that I just kind of like it. It reminds me of what I love in the spring.
In Inkscape, I created the branch with the pencil tool and grouped the paths, and then duplicated the group twice, and rotated and blurred the duplicates. I made a single flower shape with the calligraphy tool, then duplicated, rotated and resized the original to create the rest. I then gave a blurry blush to each of them with the calligraphy tool.
Today is beautiful in central New Jersey. I hope it’s beautiful where you are too.
The iBod is a new kind of computing device, one that takes you off the couch and allows you to truly interact. All of your iPad apps will still work with the iBod, but you will notice that they are just a little fuzzy because they’re just magnified, but apps made natively for the iBod will reach new heights of usefulness and a full body computing experience. Now, with the iBod, you can have a boxing match with a full sized partner, play chess as a king, dance your way to stardom, and have full body length videoconferencing. Preorders now available!
The iBod was inspired by Dan Wadlinger who suggested that I should focus on the next iteration of the iPad, and this is what I came up with. In Inkscape, I got a picture of a jumping person, a picture of the iPad, and bitmap traced both, in this case using the color tracing function of the bitmap trace dialog for the iPad. I added the tether and the background, and called it done.
Girls don't walk anywhere if they don't want to - Sarah
Girls don’t walk anywhere if they don’t want to – Sarah
One of my favorite people in the world, and someone who has participated in 365Sketches before (join in at http://www.facebook.com/365sketches) recently gave me some insight into gender differences and diversity awareness. Upon indicating that I was going to a certain location, and that if she wanted to go it was quite walkable, Sarah Badawy, without blinking said, “Well, I’m a girl, and that’s not the sort of thing we do. Just saying”. She was being facetious, of course, but I immediately thanked her for contributing to the project, to which she laughed a bit.
This sketch is really just a simple case of text manipulation, but it’s one of the most fun things to do in Inkscape. Thanks to Sarah for letting me know about girls. Just sayin.
When I was in poetry classes in college, I was always very interested in symbols of life, such as roads, rivers, paths and the like. It made an impact on the way that I self-examine — I’ll look at whether I feel like my road, surroundings, and speed are all just right, or if maybe I’m going a little too fast, I’m a bit too sleepy, or if I’m talking on the phone instead of paying attention to the road. So to speak. 😉 At any rate, this is a quick sketch that is hopeful, wishful thinking about life’s path. Even with curves like these, which life always seems to throw at us, the ride can be fun, if it’s relatively smooth, not jarring, without potholes, and so on.
Daniel Veazey, who has lately become a vocal supporter of 365sketches, recently successfully attempted a technique that I call the ‘candy coating’ effect. On YouTube at and on his blog at he repeated the technique and with some feedback started doing it exactly as I do it, though I sort of like his intermediary technique. At any rate, he inspired me to do a simple execution of it on a pointed shape because I mentioned that the technique can effectively be done on any shape.
So, in Inkscape, create some shape, like a star. If it is a shape, rather than a path, make it into a path using ctrl-shift-c
Duplicate the path. I like to make it a dramatically different color, like bright green.
Using the ellipse tool, create a circle and overlap the top part of the duplicate shape. Use ctrl-shift-c to make the circle a path. Make it a contrasting color, like red.
Shift select the green duplicate, so that you have the circle as well as the duplicated original selected.
In the path menu, select the intersect path operation. You will end up with a shape that is the overlap between the two shapes.
Using the path menu, choose inset path, then repeat this. You will see the shape shrinking in small increments.
Make the shape white.
If the shape is not placed just inside the original shape, do that now. Note how the white reflection above is inside of the darker star by a small border. Do this.
Using the gradient tool, and with the white path selected, click and drag from just above the white shape to just below the white shape.
This is the candy coating effect in Inkscape. You can do it with any shape, though I’ve found that simpler shapes work better. It’s especially fun the see the optical illusion of this effect on a circle.
In this particular piece, I also created a shadow, used a second inset, and a reversed gradient to create extra depth and physical believability. Try it, and have fun.
Thanks to Daniel for caring enough to try it, and for staying connected. I include his video below for your viewing pleasure, though it’s slightly different that the technique I describe above.
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Do your own awesome vector posters with Inkscape & potrace (ghacks.net)
What do Pi and Pie have in common: A delicious coincidence by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #poster #math #food
What do Pi and Pie have in common: A delicious coincidence by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #poster #math #food
In case it’s not obvious, notice that the mirrored numbers under the piece of apple pie could be read as the letters P,I,E. I had never noticed that before, and I’m guessing you hadn’t either. Anyway, I thought it would be a fun way to show off a fun new interesting Inkscape feature.
I had a lot of fun painting the piece of pie, building it first with the Bezier tool, and then building it out with the pencil and calligraphy tools. In order to find and place the Pi symbol, I used the brand spanking new glyphs palette feature in the upcoming version of Inkscape, 0.48. I want to personally thank Jon Cruz, one of the many amazing developers who work on Inkscape every day, for taking what was essentially a spontaneous wish for me and making it a reality in Inkscape literally overnight. I’m no longer surprised by the responsiveness and feedback by members of the Inkscape team because it’s amazingly consistent. Making connections in an open source community is a great way to influence and help to improve upon software. It requires open-minded, talented, and generous set of developers. Jon Cruz, Scislac, and ~suv are all part of a vocal great team of just those kinds of developers. Thanks, Inkscape devs!
pi, pie, inkscape, gimp, open source, design, lemasney, typography
