River with Newly Fallen Snow

This painting was for fun and practice in creating paintings with reflections and in the application of the Inkscape 0.47 Snow Crest Protrusions Filter Effect.

I am quite happy with Inkscape's ability to ripple water and blur gradients in producing paintings with reflections. I learned a lot about how careful one must be with the snow crest filter.

I scanned the photo referenced below in order to "detect edges." This single trace was used over and over to gauge boundaries of shapes, especially the branches. I was able to use the snow crest filter on the bush in the foreground and to duplicate the snow on its branches when compared to the photo by applying the snow crest filter to brush strokes of different widths, lengths and shades that I drew over the outlined shape. This took a great deal of time and patience. If you look closely around the periphery of this foreground bush, you will see that it looks as good as it does because I applied a blur to it, but doing that messed with the snow crest filter so the image ghosts all around the edge. I tried several shortcuts 'cause I am lazy and so much work ended up producing lesser quality than I was after. None of the shortcuts worked very well, so I was never completely satisfied with the snow-crest filter.

The snow crest filter did not work well on shapes that I drew with only a stroke and no fill or shapes on whose fills I had applied a gradient and even worse when I tried to apply the filter to the scanned edges themselves. These paths must be too complex for the filter to work as designed. If you click on the image to see a larger version, you will see many counter-productive, side-effects of having applied the filter too indiscriminately, especially many small specs in one of the copies of the edge scan that ended up looking like stumps and also holes and gaps in the painting that I thought I had filled but that were uncovered after the filter was applied with a blur.

I will use the filter more carefully and selectively the next time that I use it in painting with Inkscape.

Photo source upon which this painting is based: http://www.flickr.com/photos/piper/2176247846/. The author ascribed the following rights via a Create Commons license:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/piper/ / CC BY-NC 2.0