raikar designs

Illustrating Rainbow with Clone tool in Inkscape.


Rainbow and clouds.. by ~rockraikar on deviantART


After some gap, I'm back again. This post is about drawing a rainbow. There are actually two ways you can do it. One is by creating a rainbow color gradient and fill a semi-circle with it. The other is by using the tiled clones tool. Tiled clones happens to be one of the most powerful & interesting tool in Inkscape and here I am trying to draw a rainbow with it..

To start with, select the Spirals tool (F9 key) and draw a semicircle.

Let the settings be:
turns:0.50, divergence:0.00, inner radius:0.00.
Adjust the width, height and stroke width as in the image.
Now select the stroke color as the one with '?' (question mark :paint is undefined) in the stroke paint tab of fill and stroke menu. We need to do this because for changing colors of clones using clone tool it is necessary that the paint is undefined for the object. Now,the arc/semi-circle will be invisible.



Next is the cloning step.
Keeping the arc selected,
Go to edit->clone-->create tiled clones. The following settings needs to be updated:


Symmetry:P1 simple translation.
7 rows and 1 column
Shift: for X all the values are zero. for Y the per row field should be -98.5
Scale: scale X per row is -1.6, scale Y per row is -0.7, all others are zero.
Color: Initial color be red, for per row field change the H value to 13.5. Rest all should be 0.
We wont be using rotation blur & opacity so we can leave them as they are.
Now press create, your rainbow is ready.
Give it a little blur and decrease its opacity.


You have your Rainbow. You can add a few clouds like the ones here. Apply a little blur to these clouds and it will look a bit realistic.
Happy Inkscaping...

Posted by rockraikar at 12:55 PM | 3 comments Links to this post    
Labels: illustration, inkscape, tutorial, vector

Drawing shadows along with objects gives an illustration some amount of reality. I was trying to illustrate shadows and felt like sharing some thoughts that I had. Probably a beginner may find it interesting. Anyways here it is...

To draw a shadow, one needs to be clear about properties of three things:
1) source of light (position, brightness, size)
2) the subject itself which casts the shadow (position, shape & size)
3) the surface on which shadow falls (position, shape & size)
Now how do these properties affect the shadow cast by the subject... ?
These two videos give you a basic idea of how shadow can be drawn and how the properties affect them. A must see... How to draw shadows and Drawing perspective shadows.

Some points to be noted are:
Size of shadow depends on distance between the source of light, object and surface of shadow. The size of the shadow increases as the distance between source of light and object decreases.
The shadow appears blurred if either there are many sources of light or if it is far from the subject.
The position(angle) of the source of light decides in which direction the shadow is cast.

The shape of shadow is also defined by the surface on which shadow is cast. shadow is irregular on irregular surfaces.

The 3 dimensional subject is cast as a two dimensional shadow whose shape is defined by the relative position of subject and source. For example see what objects can cast a square shadow and what shadows a cube can cast ... That would give you an idea.

After getting basic idea about shadow, the next point is how do we illustrate a shadow in Inkscape.

The basic method is duplicate the subject to create the shadow, give it a grey color and decrease its opacity. Then do the transforms like skew, stretch and move. What transforms and how much you need to perform depend on the properties of source of light,subject and surface that you saw earlier.

For 2D image editing softwares, the above idea can give good results for flat or simple sjubects. When the subject is a 2D illustration of a complex 3D object some amout of imagination and manual editing of the nodes of shadows is necessary.



Here is a small how to for illustrating shadow for a human figure. You can apply the technique for other objects also.

1) Draw ellipses using ellipses tool, rotate and arrange them as above to get a human form.

2) To draw the shadow, duplicate the subject (select subject and press ctrl+d)
select all the ellipses and do a path->union.
give it a grey (888888ff) color fill and 75% opacity.

3) Group the ellipses of subject (Ctrl+g)
For time being, place the shadow object above the subject.
Align(ctrl+shift+a, center along vertical, center along horizontal axes) them both so that they overlap each other completely.

4) Angle of source of light:
Click on the shadow layer twice, you will see the handle for skew operation.
Play with the skew operation holding shift key. This will give the angle at which the shadow is formed.
Depending on the position of source of light you can settle for a shadow.

5) Elevation of source of light

Now click on the shadow object once, you can see the squeeze or stretch handle.
play with this handle. this gives the elevation or the height of the source of light.
settle for required elevation.

So now we have a shadow of the object on a flat surface(floor).
What if there is a wall some distance behind the man, would the shadow be the same ?

lets see how to illustrate that.

A) Select the shadow and the wall surface and duplicate them.
Tthen do a path-->intersection. give this new shadow object the same fill and opacity as that of the shadow.
Send the old shadow to bottom (select shadow and press end key)
We need to do a skew to the new shadow as we did earlier for angle of shadow, this time the shadow must be vertical as below.
B) The shadow that you got is not a perfect one, we need to do the stretch operation.
Decrease the opacity of the wall so that you can see the old shadow.
Draw a reference line from the old shadow to the man's head.
Now stretch the new shadow as we had done earlier until it touches the reference line.
Now reset the opacity of wall and delete the reference line.
The final result


Applying the same technique you can illustrate shadows on complex surfaces. Here is an example of shadow on steps.

Posted by rockraikar at 4:44 AM | 1 comments Links to this post    
Labels: basic, illustration, inkscape, shadow, tutorial

If you are browsing with Internet explorer then press CTRL+A, else check this link.

Initially you saw Aishwarya , then when you selected the image you saw Abhishek. This is something called as CTRL+A images that I found through an email. So I thought of doing one. The one I got above is pretty decent one. You can google it up for CTRL+A images to find many more such images. There are also few pages explaining you how to do it, but all of them with Photoshop. I thought of posting a small How-To for all those who cannot buy Photoshop but can get a free copy of Gimp.

First of all, the funda behind the camouflaged image:
This image consists of two images embedded into each other. Alternate pixels from these two different images are selected into one image. Further the levels of the image to be hidden is varied to make it a bit invisible.
Why this image shows in MS applications only is that when image is selected in those applications it masks it with a grid showing only alternate pixels.

Requirements:
You need two images, Normal image and the Camouflaged image. The Normal image(one which you see normally) should be somewhat dense and varied so that it can cover the camouflaged image. Its better to stick to a simple single subject image for camouflaged image.

Steps: Fire up GIMP

1) Create a new image (appropriate size as that of your images). Drag and drop the two images into your new image. Let the layer containing image to be camouflaged be above the normal image layer.


2) Create a new layer above them (Layer-->New layer). We need to fill it with a grid pattern. You can create your own pattern of a grid with black & transparent blocks or else just download this pattern. Copy this into patterns folder of your Gimp installation.

3) Fill this new layer with this Grid pattern.(using bucket fill tool and selecting pattern fill from tool options tab)


4) Select this layer,zoom in about 800%, go to select-->select by color. Then select any black block from the grid.



5) Now select the image to be camouflaged in the layer dialog box and press CTRL+X to delete the selected pixels. Now zoom out to 100% and toggle the visibility of the Grid layer.



6) this will be a trial & error step. Once you get a hang of it you'll know what to do & how much to do. Now select the camouflaged image layer, go to Layers-->colors-->levels and adjust the output/input levels(move theoutput levels slider to the left) so that the camouflaged image's visibility decreases. Again toggle visibility of the grid layer to see the camouflaged image. By switching the visibility of the grid you can see how your final image will look. If you are not satisfied with the output, then undo(edit-->undo history, select levels & press undo) the levels adjustment and try once more.




7) When you are satisfied with step 7, you are ready to save. Tun off the visibilty of grid layer.Save the image as png or jpg format & view it.


Tips for good result:
The camouflaged image should blend into the normal image so choosing two images that blend in well is really important. Generally the normal image should be something that is filled with lots of objects & stuff and image to be camouflaged must be a simple object with plain background. To check if the images will blend in or not, after step 1, decrease the opacity (in layer dialog box) of camouflaged image to about 40% and using Move tool (press M or tools-->transform tools-->move) move the layer to see if this image hides in well. For the abhi aish image above there was some decent match between the two.

The step 7 is the most disturbing & annoying if you don't get it properly. Most of the times there will be a small shade of the hidden image. If you adjust the levels too much, you might not see the hidden image when selected. If you do the levels a bit less there will be a shade of hidden image.Its a compromise.

And one warning, don't try this with a large image. When you select the pixels, your system may get too slow. So try with smaller (about 600px width) images.

If you stumble upon some similar image what you can do is open it with gimp, create a new layer above it and fill it with grid pattern. Using move tool shift the grid layer, you can alternately see both the images.


I'm not pretty good at explaining, hope you find it useful. Happy camouflaging :)

Posted by rockraikar at 6:50 AM | 0 comments Links to this post    
Labels: fun, gimp, tutorial

I wanted to have a globe with those latitudes & longitudes on it.I was doing it manually earlier by duplicating and resizing, but there's the clone tool to do that easily. Here is a tutorial on how to do a simple globe with latitude/longitude. I have a very bad color sense so you can surely do a better job with colors. :)
Here is what we can have



1) draw a perfect circle (holding ctrl key) with no fill and black stroke.
2) Now we need to do some cloning.
Select the circle and go to edit-->clone-->create tiled clones.
Select 'simple translation' for symmetry and following settings for shift and scale.

4) Now draw a straight line from top center to bottom center to get the equator / meridian.
5) Now duplicate this and do object-->rotate 90 degree.
We have the latitude & longitudes. Now select these and go to path-->combine.

6) Now lets get back to the original circle give it a radial gradient.
And place the latitude/longitude globe over it. ( Use align and distribute tool to center the circles)
7) You can also give a radial gradient to the latitude/longitudes, to get something like this.
8) Now you can write something at the center of the globe with bezier tool using the latitude/longitude as a grid.
9) Now select these letters and move sideways for editing. Give them a color fill and remove the stroke.

10) Do a path--> union of these letters and apply path-->simplify.
11) Give the text some suitable color, do some resizing(decrease height holding shift) and place it over the globe.

Further you can do things like giving the text or the globe a shadow effect etc like the one by heathenx here.



[ Edit: Stumbled upon this youtube video. Its really cool how you can build up on the globe layout... though its pretty tough to draw ]
The whole how-to in PNG format is available at deviantArt here. Happy Inkscaping.

Posted by rockraikar at 4:55 AM | 1 comments Links to this post    
Labels: inkscape, tutorial

Illustrating objects to give it a 3D look requires a few transforms, unions, differences & most importantly the gradient. Here is a simple circle you can draw. The technique used here applies only for basic shapes and that too for particular orientations.



Only 3 objects is all you need to get this cool 3D looking ring.
here are the steps:

step1: Draw an ellipse (let the opacity be around 75% for our visualization)
Duplicate it and scale it to a smaller size holding shift & control.

step2: Duplicate these ellipses and move them out.
Duplicate them once more and shift them vertically up by few pixels(as in image)


step3: Select the two ellipses, duplicate them and move them out.
then do path-->difference
We have our object 1.


step4: Select the two smaller ellipses from the object in step 2, duplicate them and move them out.
Now do path-->difference. (check out which object should be above which one )
We have our object 2.


step5: Select the two larger ellipses from the object in step 2, duplicate them and move them out.
We need to draw a rectangle. Its width same as the width of the ellipse
and height equal to the vertical distance between the ellipses.
Select the lower ellipse and the rectangle and do path-->union. Move this object to bottom.
Select both these objects and apply path-->difference.
We have your object 3.



step6: Now what you need to do is assemble these objects.
Zoom in and arrange them.


step7: Next we need to color them.
for object 1, a plain fill is OK.
for object 2, we need a linear gradient with variation 'dark to light to dark'
for object 3, we need a linear gradient with variation 'light to dark to light'
make the opacity to 100%



PS: when aliging objects, there may be some gaps/white spaces between them.
to hide it, give the object a stroke with the same color/gradient of the fill.


You can do similarly for triangle and square shapes. A representation is here in the PNG & SVG files.

Grouping these objects, you can do cool 3D illustrations like this and many more....
the svg.

For complex objects, and even for simple objects with different orientations, above technique is not suitable.Will try to cover that in next post.
Happy Inkscaping :)

Posted by rockraikar at 5:24 AM | 4 comments Links to this post    
Labels: 3D, inkscape, tutorial

This one is about illustrating pile of coins using Inkscape.
Steps to follow as below...


1) Draw a perfect circle (this will be our cir1 object).
Fill it with linear gradient
Duplicate it, increase its size holding shift and ctrl keys.
Fill it with darker color (this will be our cir2 object). Place cir2 below cir1 (object-->lower)
you will get something like this.



2)Select both the circles, duplicate them and move them out
and apply path--> difference
Give it a circular gradient for the fill and fill a dark color for stroke.
This will be our cir3, the coin border.


3)Slightly decrease the size of the smaller circle(cir1) holding CTRL
Now place cir3 over cir1 and cir2
Move cir1 slightly to get the slight shadow like effect of the border of the coin.



4)Type your text (preferrably in times new roman font)
Draw a beizer curve (make it as much circular as your coin)
Select both and text -->put on path.
(adjust the text size to get something like this)
Now select only the text and duplicate it to get our text in a curved path.



5)Similarly create other contents like year.
Now we will place our text within a circle
Small tweaks like rotating & resizing is required
to set them into the circle.


6)here you are, a plain simple coin.
lets make a pile of coins..



7)Select all the coin objects, rotate it and
shear it vertically to get something like this.


8)Now duplicate the coin border
Give it a grey color fill and
Send it to bottom(object-->bottom or END key)
Now move this with a slight shift downwards.


9)Now duplicate coin border once more and move it out.
We need to create a pattern to fill this.
- Type two | 's followed by two spaces.
- From object menu select pattern--> object to pattern.
Now fill the border with the pattern.


10)Now place this object over the previous coin border as above.
Select all these objects & press ctrl+g to group them.
You have your coin.



11)Duplicate these coins and place them with little shifts
Rotate one of the coin and shear it
so that it appears like leaning on the pile of coins.



12)Now if you want a shadow effect,
Move out the slant coin
Draw an ellipse and place it below the coin,
give it a grey color with about 70% opacity and 4-5% of blur.
This will be the shadow falling on the pile of coins.
Group both the shadow and coin into one object.



13)Place this(slant coin with shadow) group over the pile of coins
You can also draw another ellipse, dark grey color 100% opacity & no blur.
Place this ellipse object at the bottom to give the sharp shadow.





lots more can be done to this like
-- having a logo in the coin content
-- giving the coin content a shadow, etc.

The tutorial in PNG image format is here and in SVG format is here.

I am not that good at explaining things, especially when its in writing. Hope that you find this tutorial useful. Leave comments if you feel like...
Happy Inkscaping...

Posted by rockraikar at 4:31 AM | 3 comments Links to this post    
Labels: coin, illustration, tutorial

15 seconds is all you need for these Simple text effects in Inkscape:
1) 3D effect
2) perpective shadow
3) reflection on floor
4) glow
5) drop shadow

This isn't a tutorial, its just what I did to get these basic text effects.

3D effect:

a) Using text tool write your name. Its better if you choose a bold font. Select a dark color for the fill and no stroke.
b) Now duplicate this text(Ctrl-D). For this set no fill for the fill and a dark color for the stroke. Send this text object to bottom (keeping the layer selected, press pagedown)
c) Now give a slight shift to this object and you have your 3D effect. Try shifting in different directions to see the 3D effect in different directioins.


perpective shadow:


a) Using text tool write your name.
b) Now duplicate this text(Ctrl-D). Fill this object with grey color.
c) Now double click the object twice (so that the rotate/skew handles are active). Using the non-corner handles skew it horizontally.
d) Send this object to bottom(pagedown) and position it so that the lower corners of both the text objects are at same point.

Reflection:


a) Using text tool write your name.
b) Now duplicate this text(Ctrl-D). Drag this object using the top-center handle to make the reflection.
c) Fill this object with a gradient which has a dark to light transition. Change the direction of the gradient so that the darker color is towards the base of the text object.


glow:
a) Using text tool write your name. Its better if you choose a bold font. Select no color for the fill and black for stroke color.
b) Now duplicate this text(Ctrl-D). Apply some blur in the Fill & stroke dialog box.



drop shadow:
a) Using text tool write your name. Select a dark color for the fill and no stroke.
b) Now duplicate this text(Ctrl-D). Apply some blur in the Fill & stroke dialog box. give it a little shift.



All these effects are available in this SVG file.

Comments & suggestions for improvement are welcome..

Posted by rockraikar at 5:05 AM | 1 comments Links to this post    
Labels: inkscape, text effects, tutorial

Designed a clock in Inkscape...
SVG is here.
Thinking of drawing some cool 3D objects. Have been playing a lot to design them. Will post some sooner.

Posted by rockraikar at 5:42 AM | 0 comments Links to this post    
Labels: clock, svg, tutorial