Tracing with a Wacom tablet

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.

Trying to find an identity

I don’t want to call myself the Open Source Dilettante anymore. I thought it was funny at first, but nobody seems to be laughing. So this week I’m calling my blog “Messing around with stuff.” I think it’s an accurate title. I don’t know if I’ll keep it though. I’m not sure it snaps, you know? I need something that grabs the reader’s attention and says, “HEY! LOOK AT THIS!”

So I’m taking suggestions for a title for my blog. I want to hear ideas from all both of my readers.

In the meantime, here is a cool metallic eagle-head serpent I drew with Inkscape:

I used the pencil tool to draw a spiro with a triangle-in pattern, then added and arranged a couple of nodes in the path effect editor. I added the eye with the calligraphy tool, and differenced it out. I duped the shape twice, once to make a drop shadow and once to have a white under-layer for the chrome effect on the top layer. The background is a radial gradient stretched out horizontally.

Inkscape doodling

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.