Hey, all. Here’s a 365 request from a good friend and brilliant thinker, Deep. He sent me a picture of his phone (looks like a Blackjack, but I’m not positive) being attacked by a staple remover, but I decided to focus on just the phone. That’s a really nice aspect of Inkscape, in that you can quickly abstract a photo and remove anything that you don’t want or need without the meticulous selection work often needed to do the same in a bitmap based tool like the GIMP. Different tool for a different purpose, but this is one of the reasons I love Inkscape. I took the original image, bitmap traced it, removed everything but the phone, and then duplicated and blurred the duplicate for the glow effect. I then added a background and placed some pencil marks set to shape: triangle in to give that “shiny” attention effect. I applied the same glow effect on the pencil marks. Thanks for the submission, Deep — that’s a super phone!
Hey, all. So this is a first, and perhaps a last for 365Sketches — an advertisement. The reasons I include it here are as follows:
1. I’m excited about this event — it’s something I’ve worked with a group of wonderful people to produce. I want to have a great, rich, diverse set of attendees, such as yourselves.
2. Inkscape is used most often in my design work to advertise, and this is one of my favorite uses of it. I most often use Inkscape to arrange text, images, and shapes to convey information about an event or meeting.
Inkscape makes it especially easy to maintain another group’s existing branding, since you can use image overlays (import image), bitmap tracing, font matching (with transparency and the font tool), and color matching (with the eyedropper tool).
I hope you all check out the site, but even if you don’t I hope you consider using Inkscape for your next advertising opportunity!
This is my friend Craig Smith’s dog Stanley combined with an airliner, bringing down delicious doggy goodness in the form of bones. Thanks to Craig for sharing his photos and giving me the inspiration. Inkscape makes it easy — I took Stanley and did a bitmap trace and then took the airliner and did a bitmap trace. I removed all of Stanley but his face, and I removed the body of the jet. I overlapped them, and created some goggles with ellipses, complete with lenses (low opacity fill). I created a single bone using the rectangle tool and ellipse tool, and then duplicated resized and rotated the bones to appear to be the payload. I used the calligraphy tool set to “splotchy” and low opacity to create the cloud shapes. The land and sky are a single gradient on the background rectangle. I recreated Stanley’s ears with the calligraphy tool set to a thick brush.
I really enjoy Inkscape’s ability to take a single path and use it as a brush with the pencil tool. I do this all the time. I was walking along a path, looking at some very tall, old trees, and was thinking about how I might use a single thin tree in order to build up and flash out a larger tree. I tried it and it didn’t work very well. However, in the same experiment, I came up with this, where I used 2 or 3 different tree bitmaps, converted them to vector using the trace bitmap tool, then copied one to the clipboard, which allows it to be drawn out as a brushusing the pencil tool set to shape: clipboard. The moon is a white ellipse, the text has the candy coating technique, and the trees have a blurred white duplicate for a glow effect. Hope you enjoy it!
So this image is a very specific request from a good friend of mine, Angel. She’s been paying attention to the blog for a while, and she noticed when I had a call for requests. She sent a couple of tutorials, and a very specific set of instructions, which I tried to do faithfully:
Here’s my pic. My mission, if you choose to accept ;-): Make a vector illustration in a watercolor style. Leave color pallet the same as original picture. Then create bling text underneath the portrait that says “Pink”. Choose any style you like for the background. I will post two tutorials that show what I have in mind. Thanks!
One thing I especially love is that both of these tutorials were specifically written for Adobe Illustrator, which might lead the casual observer that they can’t be performed in another tool, but the ideas and skills were easily translatable for Inkscape, cause it’s just so damn rockin’.
So, as the tutorials explain, I created a pattern out of pink triangles and on a black background, I applied it to text, then duplicated/outset, and duplicated/blurred the text for an outline and a glow. I applied a multi step gradient to the outline.
Then, i took Angel’s image into the GIMP where I pushed the contrast and brightness for the cleanest trace. I tried once or twice with my trackpad to do a trace by hand, but without my tablet handy, it wasn’t doing her justice. I decided to go halfsies with the second tutorial and just do a linear bitmap trace. I then applied the watercolor technique by using the calligraphy tool set to low opacity and various shades that matched the photo palette as Angel requested. I varied the size of the brush, though again, the tablet would have done wonders here.
Finally, I added the word snowpocalypse to commemorate the background of the original image which was a mound of snow from the snowstorm of February 2010 which laid down about 2 feet over a couple of days in these parts.
I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have submitted materials and ideas for the sketches, and especially Angel who I’ve co-generated a lot of design ideas with over the years. She rocks the ink like an Apocalyse Pink.
This is my first entry into 365 requests, an open call for portrait, illustration, and light logo requests from friends who’d like to participate in this project. This entry was a photo from my friend Dennis O’ Brien, who happens to be the current Mayor of Newtown Township in Pennsylvania. I love working with him in any case, but I’m glad he answered my call for raw material for the 365sketches blog project. I started with his photo in which he was wearing a viking helmet and braids, obviously a fun photo where he was performing opera. I decided to run with the horns theme, and give him horns of his very own. I got a CC licensed image at Flickr from Ben Pollard (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ben_pollard/2343700094/) and did some conversions to vector, some surgery to nodes, and some fine tuning with the eraser and calligraphy tools in Inkscape. It helps that Horns are Epic, but so is Dennis.
Vector and Illustration Advice From a Shutterstock Reviewer
The Beginner’s Guide to Inkscape
Inkscape Projects
