Tag: Vector Based

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32 of 365 is an All Terrain Scout Transport (AT-ST) made out of text #inkscape

All Terrain Scout Transport (AT-ST) in type - LeMasney Consulting
All Terrain Scout Transport (AT-ST) in type - LeMasney Consulting
All Terrain Scout Transport (AT-ST) in type - LeMasney Consulting
All Terrain Scout Transport (AT-ST) in type – LeMasney Consulting

Like many people my age (I’m 36 this year), I’m a huge fan of the original Star Wars Trilogy, and although I didn’t despise the prequels like many others, I didn’t enjoy them as much as the originals. I remember being in the theater when I first saw this tiny two legged walker run across the screen in Empire, still reeling from the AT-ATs. Making this in Inkscape is just a matter of finding and importing a good clear picture of the subject, and adding some text elements to the canvas with the text tool that you can then easily “paint” with using the selection-stamp (space) method. I worked from head to toe matching pieces of text to the shapes in the image, rotating, stretching, skewing, and resizing wherever necessary to really define the outline, while at the same time keeping the image simple enough to clearly see the textual elements. It’s a slow process, but very rewarding when you are finished.

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28 of 365 is a friendly little cyclops

20100118
Happy cyclops

Pushing my quota for absurdity in this series, I decided to use Inkscape today in order to do some collage work. By taking three images from MorgueFile.com (a little girl looking over a wall, a made-up eye, and a mouth full of braces) and bitmap tracing them, I was able to make this happy little cyclops. The most work was done to remove the nodes from the originals in order to make way for the layering of the new elements, such as taking out the original face of the little girl. I masked off part of the mouth with braces, to get rid of the hard edges from the original photo.

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27 of 365 says long live evolution #Inkscape

20100117
Viva la Evolucion

I made this cutie in Inkscape by creating an ellipse, adding 3 smaller tan ellipses within it, creating ellipse based ears and eyes, and then creating a mouth out of a round capped path, which I duplicated, resized and flipped to make half a nose, then the rest of the nose. With a duplicated three node polygon, I made the shards of fur on the sides of her face, which I mirrored for the other side. I added a jungle background square, and called it done. Then, I thought better of it, added some text, and really called it done.

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18 of 365 is a Spirograph inspired piggy.

Spirograph Pig
Spirograph Pig

This was the result of me playing with the Render: Spirograph extension in Inkscape. When I first made the Spirograph, I saw the central opening as a mouth, and created a tongue, and some very simple eyes to make some sort of monster. Not really satisfied, I thought it looked a bit like a pig. I decided to push the idea by applying piggish colors, adding tweaked triangles for ears, defining the eyes a bit more, and shaping the snout with ellipses. I added the fade in the muddy background to create a bit of depth and story. I’m really enjoying learning about all of the deeper features in Inkscape — I usually would stick to the tools on the side, but I’m getting a lot out of the LPE tools, the extensions, and path tweaking.

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A psuedo-tessellation tribal mask

tesselation play in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
tesselation play in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
tesselation play in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
tesselation play in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

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.

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A girl’s face made out of lines

An illustration of a girl's face made with serial lines using Inkscape cc-by lemasney
An illustration of a girl's face made with serial lines using Inkscape cc-by lemasney
A girl's face made out of lines by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
A girl’s face made out of lines

This one was a revelation for me. Perhaps not the best application of this tool, but it was a lot of fun to play with. I just started reading about Inkscape‘s Stitch Sub Paths Live Path Effect in Kirsanov’s The Book of Inkscape and found that it was great for lining long planes with manipulable parallel paths.

In my painting classes, I learned that it’s important to sculpt your subject with your brush to help your viewer see the way that a plane is going through space. This is a simplified way of doing just that. Very fun too.

I hope you can excuse the primitivism of this experiment, but I plan to develop my skills with it in the new year. Speaking of which, I hope you all have a great 2010.