UserStories047/KatteKrab
What is your Name?
Donna Benjamin, also known as KatteKrab on IRC and a few other places.
Can you give us a Photo?
What do you think about Inkscape?
I think Inkscape is absolutely brilliant. It is easily my favourite open source application. Years ago, I tried using Illustrator and found it really difficult to get into, where as Inkscape is very easy to learn. One of the great things is the community around Inkscape. The developers are friendly and responsive, and there's a whole bunch of people making screencasts, tutorials and HowTos. I can't remember when I first heard about Inkscape, but it was Andy Fitzsimon's tutorial at linux.conf.au in 2006 that really opened my eyes to what it can do, and I've been hooked ever since.
I use Inkscape regularly to create web graphics, flyers and banners. The trace bitmap feature is really cool - it's saved me a couple of times when I've had a poor quality image to work with, and no chance of getting a better one - so i just re-created it using trace!
Can you give us a Hot Tip for using Inkscape?
I love the Star tool. Using alt, ctrl and shift to modify the basic star is kind of addictive and mesmerising. But it's a quick way of creating a certain kind of star burst effect. Simply choose the Star tool, set the number of points to 17 or something - and drag the base radius tightly into the center of the star.
Grab the SVG from Open Clip Art http://openclipart.org/people/kattekrab/kattekrab_Spring_Blossom.svg
How did you do it?
Each blossom is just a copy. It was created with the star tool. This time I created a 5 sided polygon and held down the shift key to round the angles out to -1.568. I then added a radial gradient to the center fill and to the stroke to add the soft pink flush.
I then converted the shape to a path, and added and deleted paths to get the overlapping petals effect, and fiddled with the end nodes a little to clean up the edges. Finish up modifying the colour and gradient of both the fill and the stroke.
The reason some of the blossoms are transparent, is that initially I forgot to set the outer gradient stop to white. But I liked the effect, so didn't fix it.
The branches were done with the calligraphy tool, and the background is just a rounded rectangle with gradients.
Simple.
I made a screencast of creating the blossom and popped it on youtube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNdl4FJR-NI
Do you give us permission to use this to promote Inkscape?
Yes: I release this under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.