I always like to keep an open mind about people. When we start saying why do all X do Y, we are potentially revealing our biases that we have accumulated. It’s easy to do, but it’s not always the right thing, and it’s potentially hurtful.
Tag: Vector graphics
Hey, all. I decided that today I’d celebrate some of my favorite technologies. IconDock at http://icondock.com made this easy on me, as they distribute vector based icons for a whole boatload of social media and technology companies in a icon pack. However, that’s not what you see here. I took my own favorite icons from that set, sized them up, converted to bitmap (ctrl-m), bitmap traced them to get an outline, and then aligned the outlines into a 9 up grid. Then the fun began. Using the calligraphy tool in Inkscape, along with the eyedropper tool and the original icons, I would use the eyedropper to pick colors from the originals, then apply the colors in a painterly fashion on top of the outlines I had created. After I was satisfied with all of the color, I brought the outlines back to the front. Really loved this process!
So here, I wanted to play some more with text and the pencil tool. I started by typing in the word Jungle, converting it to path, and sizing it up to be readable at 500px. Then I took the pencil tool, set as usual to shape: triangle in with spiro splines and 50% smoothing, and added vine-like shapes to the ends of each of the butts of the letterforms, to extend them. I performed a union on all of the letterforms and vine shapes, so that they all became one path, and cleaned up the joints between the letter ends and the vine beginnings. After I was satisfied with the shape, I set the color, duplicated it, and outset it twice, sending the outset path back and giving it a brighter green. I did this once again, making that outset path light yellow, with a slight blur for a glow effect.
Satisfied with the forms, I decided to create a leaf motif in the corner, which is simply an ellipse converted to path and shaped gently into a leaf form with the node tool. I added a vein to the leaf with the pencil tool using the same settings as above. I grouped those two paths into a single leaf and stem, then duplicated the leaf several more times. I created another full opacity leaf for the foreground, and many others in the background, altering the size and rotation to create a pile of leaves. I set the opacity of the background leaves to 40% or so, to let them fade into the background.
Inkscape Projects
I opened up PhotoBooth on my MBP, and took a quick close up shot of my face in a scowl. I brought it into Inkscape, converted the bitmap into a vector with both the edge detect and the threshold methods, then applied different colors to each and overlapped them. I added a background for the highlight, and finally added some plain black lines to emphasize my mouth and eyes, as they were getting a bit lost.
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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.
I used path as pattern path effect tool to make a stenciled face. In this case, I started with a photo of a girl’s face, did a trace bitmap operation, made text lines in three different sizes, then converted the lines of Inkscape‘s text into paths, and used them to paint the dark areas of the face, while leaving the lighter areas a pure white. Inkscape is an amazingly versatile tool, and this is just one more example.
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