Inkscape

pirate logo for new blog

By The Illustrator | 2011/01/12 01:52 Posted in GIMP, Graphics Tablet, Illustration, Inkscape, MyPaint | Comments (0)

pirate movie logo

My girlfriend has just launched a cool new movie blog. She asked me to do a logo for it and this is what I came up with. As usual it’s all done with free and open-source programs (FOSS), specifically MyPaint and GIMP.

The blog is not about pirating movies, despite the title. It’s about films, with reviews and a whole lot of personal opinion from a blogger with a lot of movie knowledge and a bunch of experience too.

As this image is intended as a site logo we decided to make the edges of the flag and bones as sharp as possible which meant adding another FOSS application into the operation. Inkscape was used to turn the flag into a vector illustration with sharp lines for the final stage.

sharper flag

Spaceship Illustration, Early Stages in Inkscape

By The Illustrator | 2010/02/26 02:27 Posted in Illustration, Inkscape | Comments (0)

I’m slowly – very slowly – getting on with stuff.

I’m adding vector shapes on top of one of my spaceship sketches, as I promised to do in an earlier post. I’ve already drawn about thirty shapes on to the sketch to represent such things as hull plates, greebles and other surface detail. I had the sketch zoomed in quite close as I was working on the spaceship image in Inkscape and when I zoomed out and I saw how much of the spaceship I still had to do with this first step, I got a little discouraged. It sure is time consuming to illustrate this way, but I’m hoping the final effect of a nice detailed vector illustration of this spaceship design will be worth the effort.

The new-look Starbright site, with clean white gallery like design to better show off my illustrations and designs, has also been getting some attention. It now has three pages. It is taking longer than I thought because I have to familiarise myself with yet another new app.

I was using Yahoo Site Builder on my old Windoze machine – but of course that died, so I had to find a free open-source alternative that would play nice with Linux.

Happily I found one and now I’m getting to grips with Kompozer. Kompozer is quite a simple WYSIWYG web editor, but the simplicity might well turn out to be an advantage. It is so difficult to use whiz-bang effects and all-singing-and-dancing Flash elements that the pages I’m creating are very small and quick loading. According to a lot of the SEO advice I have read, that can only be a good thing.

OK with my daily blog posting duties done, it’s time to get back to drawing little pink polygons onto my spaceship.

Scorpion, a new spaceship design sketch

By The Illustrator | 2010/02/22 23:23 Posted in Illustration, Inkscape | Comments (0)

And I’m back doing what I do best, sketching spaceships. The spaceship tag at the top of this blog is the most popular destination on this whole site, and I’ve decided to stop ignoring that. I’ve started with a spaceship sketch that was a lot of fun to do. It’s a spaceship, with a little bit of streamlining, but not to much, and a heck of a lot of detail.

The back part of the spaceship is slightly curved upwards and so I decided to come up with some sort of name based on the idea of a scorpion. To decide what scorpion related name to use, of course I went straight to Wikipedia for inspiration. Scorpiones, was the name I came up with after a quick glance at the article. A lot of people are coming to look at my spaceship designs from a listing of my site at www.travellerrpg.com and I only wish I had more time to come up with Traveller statistics for every design, and even some floor plans so that their visits were even more rewarding than the spaceship inspirational sketches and designs that are here now.

There is an awful lot of Traveller stuff here at this blog, but it got strewn to the four winds when I updated to the latest WordPress versions and the update process turned my hundreds of beautiful role playing game pages into blog posts and mixed them in with the other content, arggh, teeth gnashing noises.

So on with the design of Scorpiones. Along with the upturned tail a lot of other elements more or less suggested themselves as I was sketching this starcraft design. It sprouted two heavy warp engines and the casings for the engines were so robust looking that I asked myself if it might be able to enter an atmosphere and make planetfall on them.

While I was Googling around looking for other spaceship designs as inspiration, this nice collection came up. I don’t know if this is the artist’s official site, it seems strange that they would be using a flickr account, but what do I know. Anyway inspired by these images I’ve decided to try and add some colour to this spaceship, and after a very positive experience with Inkscape last time I had some colouring to do, I’m probably going to be putting that groovy free open-source app to use.

But before I start on such a complex spaceship I’m going to try Inkscape out on a simpler one. This simple spaceship design sketch from an earlier post.

Inkscape Vector Image with True Outlines • Cartoon Look • for Illustration Friday

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/29 15:17 Posted in Illustration, Inkscape | Comments (0)

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)

entangled_elephants_outlines_and_shading

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

Entangled Elephants, aTextured Drawing done in Inkscape, stage 1

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/28 22:41 Posted in Illustration, Inkscape | Comments (0)

Entangled is the word of the week on Illustration Friday, intended to get the creative juices of every creative type across the world flowing, and an image immediately jumped from my subconscious into my head. I straight away saw an illustration of two elephants with their trunks entangled.

Deciding to go with this idea and experiment some more with Inkscape, which I just downloaded for free. I quickly used the pencil tool to drag out some vector shapes and gave them fills and gradients, but I wanted to add more texture to the image. If I don’t do this to an illustration it always looks a bit too flat to me.

So it was time to Google about and find out how to do this in Inkscape. This blog, Textured Drawings in Inkscape: Finding Character | Carl Jagt – Geek Artist, gave me some inspiration and showed what could be done, but I really needed a step by step.

And I found one here, detailed Inkscape texture max explanation, I’ll be seeing if I can follow this complex looking procedure, and post some nice looking Elephants soon, after all I only have until next Friday.

First Stages of a Space Cat in Inkscape, for later use in Blender.

By The Illustrator | 2009/11/28 01:09 Posted in Illustration, Inkscape | Comments (0)

I am a big fan of Illustration Friday, which is an “art challenge website” where a new word is posted every week and used as a source of inspiration by artists around the world. Some of my illustrations have received excellent feedback, such as last weeks Photoshop and Bamboo Tablet illustration of the word “music”. I’ve become more and more engaged with the idea over the last couple of years, to the point that now I rarely miss posting my illustration each week.

I was waiting for the Illustration Friday word to switch and give me an excuse to start doing some work, but it didn’t change. It usually changes on Friday, makes sense I guess, but this Friday nada. Well not nada, the old word is still there.

So I decided to look for other illustration related sites, and I found

LCSV4 The Illustration News Portal which has a really nice logo, and it links to a bunch of good and inspirational images from illustrators sites. The really nice logo makes all the difference if you ask me, without it, the site might look like a really ordinary aggregator.

The image accompanying this post (it’s going to be an alien cat in a spacesuit when it’s complete) was made with Inkscape (like Adobe Illustrator – but free!!), and I’m gradually getting to grips with this app. The more I learn about it the more I like it. It’s so easy to get super clean and super professional-looking lines.

Ah the challenge word switched, now it’s “entangled”, hmm…

Starbright Illustrations (blog)