I heart coffee. I decided to do a quick Sunday morning illustration of my favorite coffee mug. I love using Inkscape to do illustration with vector shapes, as opposed to drawing with a stylus. Either are enjoyable, but the building by shapes tends to be a bit more challenging for me. Hope you enjoy it.
Let’s say you want to create a visual effect in which you have objects floating with regularity around another object, such as creating tick marks around the center of a clock. In this post, I’ll explain how you can do this easily in Inkscape. The key is in moving your center-point for the outer objects.
See the video below for a clearer explanation of these instructions. Open Inkscape. Using the text tool, create an ‘o’. Create a line with the bezier tool as your first tick mark. Put it in the perfect topmost position, aligned with the ‘o’ vertically. Click the tick mark with the selector tool until it is in rotation mode. Take the plus mark for the selected tick mark, and move it to the center of the o. This centers rotation at the center of the o. then, select the tick mark in rotation mode, and while dragging the rotation handle, hit your space bar at each place you want a tick mark. In 12 clicks of the space bar, you will be done.
An interesting use of the text follows path tool in Inkscape to show a bit of optimism.
So this is an explanation of the two key formats that you can spit out of Inkscape, the open source vector illustration program. I made it to explain the conceptual difference to my digital media communication class.
On June 4th, 2012, I gave a long session on using Inkscape in-depth to the Long Island Library Regional Consortium. We discussed bitmap versus vector images, and introduced all of Inkscape’s main tools, then ran through recreating an illustration. Some feedback I got after the session included:
So my friend Amy made me aware of a slang term that I thought was an original but that I later found in the Urban Dictionary. It describes when one manipulates through monopoly of a given person or situation. One monopulates.
tags: WordPress, open source, creative commons, postaday2011, Inkscape