View source for UserStories047/Wirelizard

===What is your Name?===

Brian Burger, but I use "Madpilot" on IRC and "Wirelizard" on many, many places on the 'net.

===Can you give us a Photo?===
[[Special:Upload]]

===What do you think about Inkscape?===

It's probably my favourite single application! 

===Can you give us a Hot Tip for using Inkscape?===

Remember that SVGs can easily be taken apart - not sure how an image was put together, or a particular effect achieved? Open the SVG in Inkscape and start exploring!

Rip it apart, try to put it back together again, take notes! The Inkscape Tutorials are all big SVG files and are perfect for doing this to; there's some spectacular SVG artwork on OpenClipArt and elsewhere that'll teach you a lot; and Inkscape's own splash screens (the ones visible at Help->About Inkscape) are SVGs themselves and always shipped with Inkscape.

Also, the Align & Distribute dialogue (Object -> Align & Distribute... or Shift+Ctrl+A) is great and incredibly powerful. Need a quick pattern, or a grid? Start with one shape or line, duplicate, and use the A&D functions to get your grid or pattern incredibly quickly and easily.

===Can you share some of your Artwork?===
[[image:Airplane_high_wing.png]]

I'm on OpenClipArt: http://openclipart.org/media/people/wirelizard
===How did you do it?===

This image started out as a tiny, highly pixelated GIF I found somewhere on the Federal Aviation Administration's website. Being a US Government image, it was aleady Public Domain, but as I totally redrew it from scratch, that doesn't apply.

I imported that GIF into Inkscape, expanded it a bit, then used Path->Trace Bitmap to get a (fairly crude) SVG version. After that, it was lots and lots of manual editing and deletion down at the node level.

Whole sections got deleted and redrawn from scratch, because the orginal GIF was so low-res it didn't produce a useable SVG when traced.

I used Path->Difference several places to 'cut' new shapes out of the black parts, and Path->Union to add a few bits where that was easier than editing existed nodes or adding nodes to existing shapes.

===Do you give us permission to use this to promote Inkscape?===

Like most OCAL images, that one is already Public Domain, so go ahead!