I’ve been learning a lot the past couple of days. One thing I learned was how to get mplayer to show my webcam while I did a screencast. Arthur Reeder taught me how to do this. If you haven’t seen his site, check it out here.
The other thing was how to do this awesome candy coating effect with Inkscape. John LeMasney taught me how to do this. You have to look at his site, 365sketches.org. He has some really awesome stuff. The rocket ship is my favorite.
This candy coating effect gives your drawing a nice shiny 3D effect. It looks like there is a bright light above the object and it’s reflecting off of it.
So here is the screencast of how to do the candy coating effect:
Thanks for taking a look. Comments, as always, are appreciated.
I bought a Wacom Bamboo Touch recently and after a little rigmarole, I got it working. So I was playing with it and drew this. I don’t think it’s particularly good or anything. I just wanted to see what kind of stuff could be done with the tablet. I imported a photograph that I took and drew the outline with the pencil tool. I traced around the glasses, then around the lenses, and then I cut the lenses out with Path -> Difference. I filled that with black. Everything was very squiggly. I used Path -> Simplify to smooth a lot of it out. Then I used the calligraphy tool to color it, with varying colors and opacities. Most of the time I arranged the colors below the original outline, but I left some of them on top. I didn’t really think about it too much. I guess one thing I could have done to make sure the outlines stayed on top would be to put them on a separate layer. I duplicated the whole thing and filled it completely with black, blurred it by 5.0 and offset it for the drop shadow over a radial gradient background.
I hope I get better at this. Comments are appreciated.
I just messed around with Inkscape for a little while today. I drew this skyline. I cut the windows out of the buildings with Path -> Difference. The sky and the sun have gradients on them and the smoke is made with the calligraphy tool, blurred.
Here in my town, Fayetteville, Arkansas, is a nonprofit called Seedling Film Association. I attended their St. Patrick’s Day celebration with Christopher Spencer of Ozarks Unbound, and good times were had. Cassie Self (I think that was her name, but I’m hard of hearing) described the association as a networking group for connecting talent to other talent. Arkansas State Representative candidate Bill Ramsey, D-Fayetteville, made an appearance. One highlight of the night was the “Leprechaun Limbo” contest:
We have to do something for St. Patrick’s Day, right? Let’s draw a shamrock. It’s a fun little sketch I made up in a just few minutes. Follow along with the video, and you’ll be Shamrockstar in no time!
Here’s a quick rundown of the main points:
Bezier Curve Tool
We use this to draw the stem. First we change the shape of the curve to “Triangle out” in the drop-down menu at the top of the screen.
Path Effect Editor
Wow, this thing is amazing. I don’t even know all the stuff you can do with it yet, but what little I’ve learned is really helpful. In this drawing, we just use it to make our stem a little wider. But you can do all kinds of stuff when you’re editing those nodes. You can add more nodes and make really dramatic effects on your drawings.
Stars & Polygons Tool
This is a quick and easy way to draw an equilateral triangle (and lots of other shapes)
Nodes
Changing the object to a path allows us to edit the nodes on our shapes so we can change them into other shapes. When using the Nodes tool, there are a ton of buttons across the top of the screen that make those nodes do just about anything you want them to, except cook and clean.
Difference
This is a neat little effect. Basically, it takes two overlapping shapes, and cuts out the top shape, taking whatever portion of the bottom shape is overlapped with it.
Afterthoughts
I’ve only been making these tutorials for a couple of weeks now. I do it mainly so I can learn, not so much that I can teach. But trying to explain how to do it helps me understand it better. Also, I try to do something every day. I think that’s key. If I don’t keep doing stuff with what I’ve learned, I start to forget it. I feel like I’ve learned a lot these past couple of weeks, and I look forward to sharing lots more with you as I learn.
I’ve been learning a lot the past couple of days. One thing I learned was how to get mplayer to show my webcam while I did a screencast. Arthur Reeder taught me how to do this. If you haven’t seen his site, check it out here.
