Weekends

I thought a bit about how to do with my goal of blogging every day and realized that weekends might well be excepted. It kind of makes sense as when I tried it this weekend I realized that I just didn't have all that much to write about. This is partly true though, as I am still feeling in, still having many things I am not quite sure of and subjects where I am not yet ready to delve into here. So I might well try to just do week-days.

I wanted to use this day to talk a little about Inkscape which is something I make use of for much of my work right now. I use it to create resources for teh website, logos and prototyping/sketching and more. I am no great artist but I know much of the techniques and I have a pretty thorough knowledge in 3D modelling and even some experience in sculpting tools. So even if I don't see myself as an artist I still like creating resources and Inkscape is one of the tools I'm using exessively. Another would be Blender for 3D stuff, but that's not in the scoop of this text.

I thought I would talk about it in the context of creating a part of a logo I'm creating. I have the basic ideas for it and one part is kind of an outlined cheetah-face so that's the part I am going to talk about. I will not call this a tutorial as I don't intend it to be, but I believe that it still could be quite helpful in making use of the tools.

So first of all I make use of different tools but I believe that my main tool and my tool of preferens is the free hand tool "Draw freehand lines (F6)".

I learned to use this tool a while after learning to use Inkscape and I really didn't concider it in the beginning because I had no idea how to use it. Once you do know how to use it it acts a bit like drawing in Flash. And Let's all be honest, flash is bad at a great many things, but as a drawing tool (especially) for someone that's not all that skilled at drawing it's quite unique and really good.

So how to make the tool useful? Well I would add some smoothing, about 20-30 I found to suite me best, but I am sure fiddeling around a bit is the best way to make it work. It also depends on if I am drawing with a mouse or tablet. Next step is to set end-points or shapes as it is called. I like the elipse-setting which basically make a triangle line beginning and a triangle line ending on each stroke. and drawing now it makes my lines rounded and I like how the lines act, it let's me draw in a sketch-like fashion but the outcome is prety refined.

So for my cheetah I started out drawing the left tear-line (if you look at an image of a cheetah you will notice that there is black lines from the eye down round the mouth and I choose to start there as it give me a lot of propotion. The line looked like this after a couple of re-draws:

I then continued to outline the eye to my liking and copied the two lines and inverted the copy (i.e. set the width to negative whatever it was). I've tweeked the position, where as far as my measurements goes, it seem like a cheetah have about two eyes width between the eyes. In my drawing it's less as I thought it felt better and also because my eyes are a bit bigger then a real cheetah has.

I keep adding the nose and mouth and worth noting is how the cheetah has a quite heartformed nose which is a "simple" shape. So I am actually happy with the result even if I might go back to tweek it later on.

The idea is to use this as part of a logo. And I guess that what I wanted to get accross is the nice look and feel the freehand with smoothing and elipse edges provide out of the box. I did use the circle tool to create the nose and just tweeked the points some, I guess I will fix symetry of them before completely done.