Field of Daisies

This painting uses the technique described elsewhere on this blog to draw the pedals of the daisies.



The photograph on which this painting is based may be found on: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsmagic/477110217/The photo was published under the following creative commons license.

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

Drawing stems and leaves with Inkscape 0.47

Occasionally, I try to replicate someone else's painting technique using Inkscape. This is a common technique in oil and watercolor painting in which one turns the brush during the stroke in order to go from a thin line to a wider shape. One application of the technique is for drawing leaves quickly, effortlessly and in perspective. I have found that this too can be accomplished in Inkscape using specific settings for the brush tool and some practice. Try a leaf that extends toward you, the painter, and I think that you will agree that the technique works very well. Click the picture for a larger view of the simple instructions.

More experiments with painting rocks

I have devised another method of simulating rocks using Inkscape 0.47 that is simpler and faster than the method described in the previous post. The illustration to the right contains the required settings. Click on the image to open a larger version.

This method achieves all of those that I identified in the previous post.

Experiments with painting rocks

I left the rocks and cliffs on the mountain painting incomplete. I set down their placement to my satisfaction, but I do not like the contrasts within the rock itself -- that is, the cracked lava filter produced too much sparkle. To the right, I have outlined one technique in its various steps that I plan to try on the painting to achieve several benefits. The benefits that I seek include the ability to draw rocks over larger areas and then to trim them to the actual shapes that I see without having the filter effect change. You will find, as you experiment with Inkscape filters, that moving and resizing an object to which you applied a filter changes the filter's effect. Another benefit that I seek is to use a filter, but to change the contrast of the effect without altering the effect itself. In this case, I wish to lessen the sparkle and but keep the the effects of ridges achieved by using the filter in the first place. Finally, I wish to apply blurs and or gradients to objects which contain filter effects without changing the shape of the effect -- I want to affect only the filter effect's contrast with its surrounding objects. I have complained about ghosting when blurs are applied to filtered objects in another post on this blog (river with newly fallen snow), so I really am using this feature enhancement on one painting to solve a general problem that I have run across in other paintings. Finally, I have used the technique described here before with success with other filters (watercolor-style painting of river), so I wanted to see whether it would work as well on the cracked lava filter. It looks promising. Click on the illustration to see a larger version.