Tracing with a Wacom tablet

Posted on March 22, 2010 by Daniel Veazey

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

Posted on March 21, 2010 by Daniel Veazey

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.

Gimp Tutorial: Super Groovy Wallpaper Part 3

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Daniel Veazey

Wow, we’re already to the third and final installment of our Super Groovy Wallpaper project. Let’s dive right into the video, shall we?

Well, that was fun! What have we learned?

Gradients

Gradients are a way to fill an area with a nice blend from one color to another. You can even put several colors into the same gradient, and blend them all together.

More about drop shadows

We’ve already learned one way to put a drop shadow under text. Here we used a different method to make one. An important lesson to take from this is that there’s almost always more than one way to get what you’re after. You might find multiple ways to do the same effect. Don’t be afraid to experiment. It’s fun.

Layers and locking the alpha channel

We duplicated layers, we applied layer masks, and we locked the alpha channel on a layer. The alpha channel is just a fancy way to say “transparency.” When you lock the alpha channel, the transparent areas of that layer won’t be affected by whatever editing you do to that layer. It’s a very handy feature and it was mighty useful when we made that drop shadow.

Thanks for checking out this tutorial. Like always, I’d love to hear from you.