After cruising through Pixelgirl Presents I was quite inspired to try a bit of imagery myself. I started trying to do something in The Gimp but it didn’t really have a good way of drawing shapes other than freehand. So I went to my trusty Adept package manager and searched for “vector” and got a list of vector drawing software. From the descriptions I liked the sound of Inkscape. So I installed it and gave it a try. I was going to just make the shapes in Inkscape and copy them to my working file in The Gimp but it doesn’t seem to be able to do that. After a bit of testing I managed to find the features I needed and…
Inkscape is great!!!
It’s easy to use, quite intuitive and I look forward to playing with it more. Their own description of the software from their site goes something like this:
Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.
It sounds like it has pretty much all I need. I now also have a plugin for The Gimp so that it can import .svg files, so if Inkscape can’t do it, hopefully The Gimp can! Inkscape also exports .png files properly, with all their transparency intact. I was very impressed with this after Corel Photopaint which isn’t very good at exporting transparency at all. Now if only IE could cope with transparent PNGs properly we could have some design fun.
These are the images I made, or the one image I made which I changed the colours of so I could use the same pic in a different colour for each of my desktop backgrounds.
Click on the images for larger versions to download.
There’s also a black and grey version.
those are great!! you have a creative flair. could I have a copy of the bubbles_blu one? i currently have “The hour before dawn”…
I know it plain but you know how I like simplicity and it’s black which I like!
i might try designing one myself. i just received a photoshop software from my webhost as part of a special offer deal – just gives me an excuse to use it.
Glad you like ’em! You can definitely have bubbles blu. If you want you can just save the image (1024×768) from where I have it hosted. If you want a larger copy let me know which size and I shall email it to you. You can even have a black and grey version if you like.
That hour before dawn is cool. I really like those minimalistic ones. It gets a bit scary when your computer screen has so many colours it’s lit up like a christmas tree.
You should definitely give the Photoshop software ago! That’s cool that it was complimentary. For graphic stuff I’ve used Adobe Photoshop CS (and 7 but CS is newer and better), Corel PhotoPaint 12, The Gimp and now Inkscape. They all have their strengths and their drawbacks but it sure is fun to play 🙂
I just checked. You can get Inkscape for Mac, Linux and Windows so that’s prety cool.
Thanks! I’ll get the black and grey one too! Didn’t see that one.
1024×768 is fine – that’s what I use now.
Minimalism is my thing! I haven’t used photoshop before, I have heard that it is a very powerful software. Not sure what version I have – I am sure it is not a full one but would probably be good enough for me.