Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/11/29/inkscape-vector-image-with-true-outlines-cartoon-look-for-illustration-friday/

The word on Illustration Friday this week is entangled, and I have created an Entangled Elephants illustration. You can see stage 1 of this Inkscape vector image here.

I am still starting out with Inkscape, but it really is intuitive and fun to use. Creating these nice cartoon outlines was simple. I just copied the elephant that needed an outline stroked the elephant beneath and tugged on the Bezier curves to make it a bit more irregular and cartoony. I was inspired to this method for outlines, rather than regular path stroking by this forum thread Creating true outlines • Topic • InkscapeForum.com. It seems this is something people re always doing, and it’s a routine task in Inkscape.

The image has nice flat areas of colour, something that Inkscape does superbly. In fact it’s a lot of fun with a pen and tablet to tease out a line, adjusting the bezier curves by dragiing on them as you go. It becomes quite intuaive after a while, and some quite free-hand-looking shapes can be created as the work becomes quicker, like the cloud in the background of this illustration.

I think the image is quite close to something that I could call complete, but I must admit that I’m tempted to fire up the GIMP, get my Bamboo Pen graphics tablet out and have a go scratching away at this image to give it a bit more interest. I could add some structure to the elephants at the foreground of the image, or perhaps work on the sky in the background and give it some interest to match what’s going on in the grass.

(edit)

So here is that image with a little bit of hatching here and there.