Changing gears . . .

This site was built originally for two purposes, both of which have been achieved:

I wished to popularize Inkscape as a tool and SVG as a format, and others have succeeded on this first front. Inkscape is a very full-featured graphics tool, but i have moved on to using watercolor on canvas and will continue to paint. SVG has been widely adopted and well used.

The site was left dormant as part of the second goal which was to test Search Engine Optimization techniques on an untouched and practically unused site filled with absolutely unique content. The test was successful, so now I wish to actually use the blog to point to newer work coming from the other side of my brain -- programming and software engineering.

On this front, I have begun to learn the ELM Language for front-end development. Recent work is on github.

I chose ELM for three reasons:

1. My back-end side projects all use functional programming languages and I wished to use that same approach on the front-end;
2. And, I wished to separate front-end work as cleanly and as completely as possible from the back-end and to minimize pain-points in front-end development like manipulating the DOM and adjusting CSS;
3. Finally, ELM is type-safe and compiles to Javascript, so the code works without runtime errors and is very portable.

More about how ELM helps me achieve each of these goals in future posts.

Turbulent Water

Experimenting with Inkscape's filters to simulate turbulent water.

Inkscape painting of an English garden

I worked from dark to light using three layers in Inkscape. Pictured above is the finished painting, and below the dark green, red and purple layer on top of the background, with the background alone at the bottom.





You may download a partial source document in XML format of layer two from Google Docs.


The photograph upon which I based the painting is hosted on Flickr and distributed under a Creative Commons license.

Falling water in a mountain stream

Pictured above is stage two of the two-stage painting process using Inkscape. You may download a detail of the water layer from Google Docs. A few of the techniques and filters applied on top of the water in step two are not easy to examine until they are separated from the other layers and from the base image created in step one. The SVG download includes a contrasting background to highlight the details. This background is not part of the actual painting.

The sprite below shows step-one. The two-step process involves laying out the shapes, basic contrasting colors and values in the first step and saving that work as an image.


Then, in the second step, painting on top of that imported image goes smoothly and quickly. I have also used the two-step process successfully to paint a sunset by the Pacific Ocean.

The photo upon which this painting is based may be seen on flickr.

The photo is licensed under creative commons.

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