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56 of 365 is changing from a pencil to a quill in #inkscape

From a pencil to a quill - LeMasney Consulting
From a pencil to a quill – LeMasney Consulting

 

From a pencil to a quill - LeMasney Consulting
From a pencil to a quill – LeMasney Consulting

I was inspired to make something that reminded me of President’s day. When I think of Washington, I think quills, and when I think of Lincoln, I think of pencils, though they both had both. I can’t explain why, this is just what came to me. So this one is all about the interpolation extension (extensions/generate from path/interpolate) which takes two paths and creates intermediate shapes that show how one shape turned into another shape. It’s great for creating animations, but also for illustration. For instance, you can take two related objects (like a pencil and a quill) and have them connected by a series of shadowy shapes. So, in order to do this, I created a pencil by hand with the Bezier tool, and then created a gradient that described what we’d expect to see on a pencil (yellow paint, woody tip, lead, eraser). I also found a nondescript image of a feather, brought it in and took a duplicate of the pencil and shaped that into the quill. For that gradient, I created a feather like set of transitions. I then applied the Interpolate extension to create the tweening. Really just an experiment for me here, but I can see using this in other situations, for sure.

  • New Concept: ‘Erasable’ Printer Uses Lead from Old Pencils (treehugger.com)
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50 of 365 is a Misty Morning Hop #Inkscape

Misty Morning - LeMasney Consulting
Misty Morning – LeMasney Consulting

 

This image was meant to be a rendering of a memory of sultry summer mornings where the heat of the coming day meets the wetness in tall grass and makes for a bit of fog. I made a single leafy reed with the ellipse tool and the calligraphy tool, then set it as a brush by copying it and using the pencil tool set to shape: from clipboard. I added some tall grasses with the pencil tool set to shape: triangle in.  I applied a color jitter to all of the shapes after setting them to a solid dark leafy green. I added a blurry gradient for the background, and a blurry dark green rectangle in the foreground to add some depth. I added the text, dupliacted it and blurred the duplicate for a soft foggy effect. With snow on the way here in New Jersey, I’m looking forward to seeing the summer morning fog again.

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42 of 365 is a cat sleeping on a tabletop #inkscape

Cat sleeping on table - LeMasney Consulting
Cat sleeping on table – LeMasney Consulting

So this is my cat Jimmy, sleeping not on a table, actually, but a media switch. I just used the calligraphy tool to sketch his outline kind of quickly, then duplicated it and blurred the dupe just a little. Then I duplicated it again, flipped it so as to create a mirror image, and used the gradient tool to have it fade out for a mirrored effect. Under it all is a rectangle with a gradient applied to create a planar difference between the background and the table surface.

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29 of 365 is a sun trying to break through the clouds #inkscape

20100119
Sun breaking through

This was a quick study. I used the shape tool to make the sun, then added eyes and mouth with the pencil tool. I put in a blue background block, and then using the ellipse tool, I made a cloud with several circles. To create a single shape, I selected the circles, and did a path union operation. Finally, I added a blur to the clouds. UPDATE: I decided to give some shimmer to the clouds. I added a gradient from blue to yellow towards the sun for the stroke on the cloud, and gave a low layered duplicate for the sun shape a slight blur for a glow effect.

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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.