Oh what a tangled web.

To create this semi-realistic spider web I used Inkscape. First I created a background layer consisting of a radial gradient from green to black and a few blurred green elipses to create the effect of some out of focus greenery. The next layer was the main spiderweb. I started by using the Bezier draw tool to spell out the text. This was made twice as thick as the rest for emphasis. Then the rest of the web was drawn. All the paths had Add Nodes and Jitter Nodes applied. The raindrops were created by following this screencast at screencasters.heathenx.org. The raindrops were added only to the text portion of the web. Finally the web opacity was reduced to 50 percent.

Be Alert.

Here I am fooling around with warning signs. I created a custom pattern of hexagons for the sign to create the reflective coating effect seen on modern road signs. I just created the pattern as black with no fill, a slight blur and 25% opacity. The other detail I added is a sign number in small text at the bottom of the sign. This detail is also often seen on modern road signs.

The rest of the sign follows the common techniques for creating a realistic looking sign. Tutorials for this are all over the web. The text of course is the common alert pun, because of course the world needs more Lerts.

Rotoscope.

I have been trying a rotoscope test over the last few days. For those who don't know rotoscoping is tracing frames from a film to create an animation. I downloaded an avi from the Internet Archive Prelinger Archive. It is a good source of movies that can be used without copyright issues. After I got a source movie I exported a clip as jpg images. The process I used was to take each jpg and open it as a layer, create a new layer with 45% opacity, then traced the main lines of the image. It is a slow process but the result was interesting. The next step is to test other open source programs to find the easiest and quickest workflow for rotoscope animation.

Back to Basics.

Today I spent some time getting back to basics. I spent an hour outside in the garden pencil sketching. It was an enjoyable change of pace from digital art.