{"id":287,"date":"2010-02-24T14:53:38","date_gmt":"2010-02-24T19:53:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/365sketches.wordpress.com\/?p=287"},"modified":"2020-07-11T15:09:34","modified_gmt":"2020-07-11T19:09:34","slug":"65-of-365-is-a-prevail-whale-made-in-inkscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lemasney.com\/consulting\/2010\/02\/24\/65-of-365-is-a-prevail-whale-made-in-inkscape\/","title":{"rendered":"65 of 365 is a prevail whale made in #inkscape"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Prevail<\/a>

Prevail Whale 2<\/p><\/div>\n

For those of you who use Twitter, you have likely seen the Fail Whale, which shows up whenever the system is beyond capacity<\/a> or encountering some other issue that ceases service. It’s a beautiful, fun design, and I think of it as being akin to a creative 404 error page, or a really peppy upbeat quirky hold music playlist.\u00a0 At any rate,a long time ago, I made a play on this design called the prevail whale, one of the few times I had some serious kudos action<\/a> on my Flickr account. I decided to update my design to move further away from the look and feel of the original Fail Whale, and display a bit more of Inkscape<\/a>‘s capability. The Prevail Whale works against the things that try to hold it back, fighting against fail<\/em>, and having fun while doing it. It’s my personal mascot for social media.<\/p>\n

Lots of techniques were used here. The waves are a Bezier tool construction, duplicated and extended several times. I used a dotted line for the stroke, and various sea toned colors for the waves. The birdies were just a simple ellipse and rectangle construction, joined, then tweaked with the node tool. Once I liked one, I duplicated and positioned them, grouped them, and applied a gradient to all of them simultaneously. The cloud and sun are techniques I’ve done here before. In this case, there is a glow on the sun, and a dotted line for the sun’s stroke. The whale is constructed from an ellipse, a triangle, and some other curved shapes, all thoroughly tweaked, joined, and worked to be continuous. I applied a gradient, to create a whale like skin tone. The eye is a series of ellipses, made very much like I might make a human eye. The tongue was maybe the hardest piece in the whole piece, as I had to shape, reshape, and tweak to make it feel right. The eyebrow is a pencil set to shape: triangle out. The tiny tiny teeth took a while — about 200 clicks with the Bezier tool, meticulously placed to get that great tiny tooth effect. I applied a glow to the whale by duplicating, setting yellow, and blurring. The blowhole spray was a quick kidney bean shape with the Bezier tool, with translucency added, and some dots made with the pencil’s ctrl-click to dots technique . It was a great deal of fun to make, and as always, I thank you for taking a look!<\/p>\n

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