Inkscape adventure continued…
If you have been reading my recent post about my Inkscape adventure you know that this adventure didn’t go quite as well as I expected it to go. I must admit that this was mainly because of the fact that I couldn’t work on my regular working-machine and therefore ended up frustrated and fed up with the replacing machine and automatically with Inkscape. Now that my Macbook Pro has been fixed again I wanted to give Inkscape another (fair) chance. This time a honest one, free from certain prejudices and free from my own agony towards the machine that I had to work with.
Unlike my previous attempt in working with Inkscape I this time started with an empty glass (last time this glass was full with Adobe based expectations). I already had my design kind of figured out, inspired by a drawing I’ve made a few years ago. As last time I started with no tutorial, just out of the blue I started drawing lines and contours of the drawing. This however didn’t result in the exact result that I wanted, mainly because I was just playing around. I always, when new to a program, enjoy messing around and just trying out random tools. I then always end up not satisfied with the result, and abandon the hope that I could figure out this program just by randomly clicking around. If you want to see the result of this fooling around, click here (probably I will continue working on it in the nearby future).
So I started over from scratch, this time (how clever) using a tutorial on how to make a cute little penguin. To my surprise after 2 hours messing around in Inkscape and have read a short beginners tutorial I quickly started to feel at ease with the interface. Especially the bezier tool offered many possibilities in adjusting a shape to my exact needs, the other tools also had many possibilities; each tool could be adjusted to specific requirements. I must admit that after working a few hours in Inkscape it became addictive to keep trying new tools out.
Things that I didn’t like about Inkscape: for example the weird things that Inkscape did with your work after exporting it to a .PNG, after a few tries it finally showed my work as it was displayed on the canvas. Also copy and pasting an element resulted in a distorted image, so I had to continuously use the option duplicate (this however could be blamed on me having to adapt myself to a new way of working). Another thing that really bugged me was the organization of the layers; when I added by accident a path to a layer that didn’t belong there, it became really difficult to retrace this mistake and fix it. I couldn’t find a way to group certain layers, and easily add objects to a certain layer or layer-group. The only way to do this was by pressing CTRL + PAGE-UP or PAGE-DOWN, depending on the direction you wanted to move your object to. This however seems very awkward to me.
Filling an object with a stroke style comes in very handy if you are working with flat objects. For example a t-shirt with no curves. For the Wondering44 work I wanted to use this stroke tool for the dress, but the option to adjust these strokes to specific needs was very limited. So I ended up drawing the stripes with the calligraphy tool, with worked out just fine actually.
Toconclude: compared with Illustrator I find Inkscape a worthy opponent (with a major bonus for Inkscape for being open source) to other .svg programs. I think I will continue experimenting with Inkscape since I think open source will be the future and I don’t want to attach myself too much to Adobe programs. I know that I have said in my other post ‘Inkscape adventure‘ that I’ve already sold my soul to Adobe, but I guess that my soul is for sale again?
So glad to hear that you gave it another go, and that Inkscape now has you addicted to experimenting with its possibilities!
Wow, nice work. I guess it’s better to sell your soul to Inkscape than to the devil ;) Did it really take less than 2 hours to figure it all out using the how-to guide? Maybe I should try as well.
:D I totally agree with you on that one Emina.
And yes; with a basic tutorial and an open mind, mix that with some patience and Inkscape will open up to you. I really enjoying working with Inkscape, it’s definitely worth a try!
Btw: I found that Volkskrant article about ‘Daggering’, I’ll try not to forget to bring it with me for you next Monday.