Tag: Vector Based

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A circular calendar by John LeMasney

A circular calendar by John LeMasney
A circular calendar by John LeMasney
A circular calendar by John LeMasney
A circular calendar by John LeMasney

One evening I was thinking about how strange it was that 360 degrees in a circle is similar to 365 days in most years. I was then thinking that if you broke out the days of the calendar year along the clockwise path of a circle that it might be a very interesting way to mark time, especially for a project like mine. You might see, for instance, at a glance, how much of this project has passed so far. So I made it in Inkscape.

I used the amazing and flexible Render Polar Grid extension as a base. I gave it 365 angle divisions and 2 major circular divisions, and tweaked the other settings with preview enabled until I had what I wanted. After that I began counting angle divisions from the top center, which I labeled January 1, to the division line that was 31 gaps away, which I labeled February 1 and so on. I extended the lines of the polar grid where these first days appeared. This counting, for me, was easily the hardest part of the project. I had to count lines 2 and 3 times, and remember that the first day of the next month was 29 and not 30 days away or what have you. Finally, I added an ellipse with the division feature enabled to show part of the ellipse as filled. Look for the little circle handle on the ellipse you made and move it with the node tool to play with this feature.

So, Inkscape is also a fantastic tool for conceptual design and ideological illustration, but you knew that. 😉

 

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Webmonkey – LeMasney Consulting

Webmonkey - LeMasney Consulting
Webmonkey - LeMasney Consulting
Webmonkey - LeMasney Consulting
Webmonkey – LeMasney Consulting

Ask any of my esteemed colleagues on the TEDxNJLibraries team what my role is and, as likely as not, they’ll say that I’m the TEDxNJLibs WebMonkey. I do most of the updates on our site at and have been one of the champions for the solution and methods for our site. I’m proud of the work, and proud of the title, very much a term of endearment.

With this in mind, I wanted to do a painting in Inkscape to have a realistic rendering with harsh lines of a monkey. In the background you can see some code from our site, which is WordPress based. I guess if I was being true to that I’d have copied in the PHP rather than the rendered XHTML, but you get the picture. I started with a few photos of monkeys and used them as a base for building the face with the calligraphy tool, working with the eyedropper tool and using the original photo as a palette, but after I had the basic structure, I decided to remove the photo and build up the image from my mind. I especially love the way the sparkle and color come through in the eyes. It reminds me of the way I light up inside when I get a chance to add new content to the site. 😉

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Orange bokeh – John LeMasney

Orange bokeh - John LeMasney
Orange bokeh - John LeMasney
Orange bokeh - John LeMasney
Orange bokeh – John LeMasney

This is another image that makes use of the spraypaint tool in 0.48 order to make a bokeh effect. The silhouetted tree was a photo from MorgueFile converted to vector with a bitmap trace. In the background is a gradient to convey that particular color from that time of the day. A quick one, but very enjoyable to do.

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bandage illustration – LeMasney Consulting

bandage illustration - LeMasney Consulting
bandage illustration - LeMasney Consulting
bandage illustration - LeMasney Consulting
bandage illustration – LeMasney Consulting

I imagine everyone reading this has had the weird common experience of using disposable bandages, like the pain of removing them, the sort of icky fascination with the uncovered transformation, the rules and practices of how to prepare the cut and the strange way in which the color of the bandage is not really the color of anyone’s skin, but is closer to some people’s skin color than others (excluding character band aids, clear bandages and other movements forward in this respect). At any rate, the whole thing is kind of weird, culturally speaking, and I like to focus on weird stuff here.

This is one of the more complex scenes I’ve done in Inkscape. The bandage was made using a few overlapping and tweaked rectangles. I made the circular perforated breathing layer by making one ellipse, duplicating it, then duplicating those until I had a row, then duplicating those into an offset row, and so on. I built the thumb and finger with rectangles. The drop of blood has the candy coating effect applied. The most fun weird part is the armhair, which I created with Inkscape 0.48’s new spraypaint tool. I made a thin line of multidirectional hairs, then randomly duplicated them with the spraypaint tool. One of my favorite new tools, for sure. I moved the hair that was in the path of the bandage to the adhesive parts of the bandage. Finally, I created some abstract blurry, overlapping low opacity shapes for the dried blood on the bandage.

Weird, I know, but it was a lot of fun to make for you. Thanks for checking it out!

John.

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Blue bokeh – John LeMasney

Blue bokeh - John LeMasney
Blue bokeh - John LeMasney
Blue bokeh - John LeMasney
Blue bokeh – John LeMasney

So, in an earlier sketch (dark green bokeh), I used Inkscape’s Tiled Clones feature to create a Bokeh effect, though at the time, I myself was less than impressed with what I came up with, and knew that I’d be coming back to it to make an improvement, which i feel like I’ve achieved here. I love Bokeh images, and in a camera, they’re generally created by having distinct backlight sources that are far out of focus while having a foreground subject or space that is in focus. In this particular case, I was creating a scene that focused on just the out of focus back light sources. Here, we might be looking at a building with lots of bright reflections in the distance, or water on a large lake on a sunny day, but in general, I think Bokeh are magical, mystical, and beautifully abstract.

With the beta of Inkscape 0.48, many people have been hard at work bringing new features to Inkscape. One of the most exciting differences for me between 0.47 and 0.48 is the brand new spraypaint tool, which allows you to take a single object or group of objects and quickly recreate them as a stream of overlapping clones, as though you had a spray can filled with a shape. You can affect the size, rotation, and other aspects of the copies or clones that you create with the tool, and it does a great job of injecting random placement into your design.

This tool was made (amongst many other uses) for just this kind of sketch. In Inkscape, I created a blue background rectangle, then I placed a single white ellipse and set it to 50% opacity. Then, using the spraypaint tool, I clicked and dragged the ellipse, which created a series of randomly placed clones at different sizes as I moved the tool about the canvas. It quickly created a randomness for the bokeh that worked nicely. I also used Inkscape’s tweak tool to affect the hue, brightness, and opacity of the shapes. Finally, I selected a few of the shapes at a time and increased blur at varying levels.

A very fun, very quick way to create this effect in Inkscape. Thanks to @JonCruz, @Scislac, and the rest of the Inkscape developers for a great upcoming release.

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Canada – LeMasney Consulting

Canada - LeMasney Consulting
Canada - LeMasney Consulting
Canada - LeMasney Consulting
Canada – LeMasney Consulting

Hey, all. This is one of the simplest sketches ever, but I think often about how much I appreciate the humor, culture, music, and exports from our northern neighbors. I really loved the way that they hosted the winter games, too. One of my favorite Canadian exports by far is one JanieH who’s been helping me a lot lately, and so it all came together as a need to say thanks to Canada for putting out some really great stuff. I hope to go someday.

In inkscape I took a morguefile image of a maple leaf, a clear Canadian symbol, imported and bitmap traced it in edge detect mode, changed the fill to red, and performed the candy coating effect on it, which is more or less just some visual trickery with the gradient tool and an inset, duplicated path. For a final touch I placed a metallized paint filter on the background rectangle to give it a bit of shine.

Hope you enjoyed it!