Inkscape - filters magic

Inkscape is an Open Source "Free graphics vector Editor" - that you can download and use under Windows, Linux and OS X.

It doesn't work like Photoshop or Gimp - but more like Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X ; which mean you will deal with vectors instead of pixels.

The huge benefits of vector is that compared to pixels, when you zoom into the picture,  it stays crisp - you won't get large square or stairs.

You draw shape, square, triangle, stars, and color them, use gradient, you can mimic 3D ... but when it comes to textures, and photo effect, usually people start to look at Photoshop (or Gimp) - while in fact Inkscape is perfectly capable of doing it too - have a look at the scenery below.

It's in fact very basic shape for the sky, 3 layers for the grass and the tree - where some filters were applied.

Open Clip Art (ocal) a bad news and a good news!

I've got a bad news and I've got a good news.

The bad news is the openclipart upload has been broken for over a month (last successful upload 31-July-2009!) - So that's quite a shock and a sad news.

The error is :

"/var/www/openclipart.org/htdocs/cchost/cchost_lib/cc-fileverify.php"(223):

Uninitialized string offset: 0 [2009-08-25 13:08


pm][127.0.0.1][/cchost/submit/fullmix]

But the good news is : the openclipart team is working on a "beta" website and it looks brilliant already!

have a look here.

I really like the new website, every features I've dreamed of are now there :

• Clipart preview
• Browse Clipart by Tag with Preview 
• Five Stars system for Clipart evaluation  
• and it's still organized by Artist's profile 
• etc ... 

Announcement openclipart release version 0.19 (cont'd)

While I'm using the new ocal version ... I noticed the 0.19 release includes 248 html files with quick preview - this is new (compared to previous release) and really makes the ocal's browsing experience fun ...

For exampel I found this excellent set of cartoonish animals from StudioFibonacci.

Here's the link to the official announcement from Jon Phillips co-foundator of the openclipart website
Open Clip Art Library Release 0.19 Announcement and OCAL10K Goal Exceeeded | rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

On a sidenote I also noticed a few cliparts that were included in the 0.18 release have disappeared in the 0.19 ; like this one below - luckily it's still available from the clker.com website :

Announcement openclipart release version 0.19

Great day for the openclipart community !
The new openclipart library (release 0.19) is available to download (375MB)
that's about 12,000 high quality scalable vector graphics (SVG) files released into the public domain by over a 1000 artists


it's around 1GB after extraction (including png and svg files) - and the library is sorted by Artist's name - which is cool !


More information on this Announcement 19 - Open Clip Art Library Wiki

Inochi

It happens not very often, but that is always nice - when someone send me an email - saying "thanks, for your nice vector clip contribution posted on Openclipart, I will use this clipart for my book / project / logo - how would you like to be credited ?"

The last time it was this 3 flowers clipart - that a kind developer has merged with the word "Inochi" (which is the Japanese word for "life").

More information there Inochi 0.1.0

NB : All posts on Openclipart are Public domain - which mean that people using it doesn't even need to says anything to the "artist" - that's why I really appreciate those people who takes time to send a kind email such as this one.

FileManager using tags

Tagging, is it the future of the file manager specie ? I don't know ... But I know for sure that wasting time searching for a file is very frustrating - especially in the middle of a creation.

Of course using filenames with a limited number of characters was fine until the average HD size reached around 80GB. Now it's getting more and more tricky to organize a collection.

Let say you are trying to setup a collection of clip-arts :
usually you start with a simple structure like characters, sceneries, items.
But then you want to get in more details : face, signs, outline
and where do that fit ?

That's why (I guess) tagging is the best way to get organized (and that's probably the reason why openclipart.org is using tags too !).

And recently I found that dream tool ; it's named "tracker" - and after 3 days of testing I'm quite happy with it, because it is very intuitive, and offer a lot of flexibility in organizing a collections of pictures, textures, outline, portrait, black and white, cartoon, scenery etc ... The perfect companion for Inkscape.

Meta Tracker - tracker-project.org

Popeye is free

Yep, yep ... Popeye is copyright free (at least in Europe)
and is already on Open Clip Art Library Popeye

What does that mean ?

Anyone can print and sell Popeye posters, T-shirts and even create new comic strips, without the need for authorisation or to make royalty payments.

see this link for more details.

Xmas mix - contact sheet

Almost same result as in the previous post - but this time, the left picture was produced by a Gimp's script.

link to Robin Gilham's script
http://registry.gimp.org/node/120

Works perfectly -

You just have to copy the file contactsheet.py in the plugin folder (/home/username/.gimp-2.4/plug-ins) and make sure it is executable.

Then you'll find in the Toolbox window under "Xtns/Batch/Contact Sheet"

Openclipart Xmas mix

Little experiment today with a few opencliparts related to Santa and Xmas

the picture on the left was generated
from 8 cliparts with the following command (using the great tool imagemagick)

montage -label %f -frame 5 -geometry +4+4 *.png xmas.jpg


Here's the link of the various clipart : [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

Open Clip Art Library Jingle Bells

Open Clip Art Library Jingle Bells: "Jingle Bells Christmas decoration"

Deck the halls with boughs of holly
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
'Tis the season to be jolly
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la

Open Clip Art Library Skull , leprechaun, and red star

Open Clip Art : Computer and Padlock

Today i updated the blogspot's layout / header by adding a clipart from AJ
a neat desktop computer a bit cartoonish - and also found this pretty cool packlock



Very good work !

Open Clip Art Library Big Book

Another gem of the openclipart.com

Open Clip Art Library Baroque pattern

Some gems can be found in the openclipart.org website

This Baroque pattern for example

Konrad (adaptation)

DL svg [1]

Wesnoth

The Wesnoth community is very talented, and i was impressed by some many of the contributions i found on their website (wesnoth.org) - also found nice tutorials and advices.

Here's my humble adaptation of a full size Konrad

---

DL svg [1]

openclipart thumbnail preview

It seems that some contributions on openclipart don't have preview on the clipart page ; and that is unfortunate since visitor have to click the svg file to have a pick at the picture



the solution :
Uploading a .png file first is enough to generate the clipart's preview.
Then upload the svg file afterward.

http://op3ncl1part.blogspot.com/search?q=thumbnail

* Update *

Now for a more global preview on the openclipart website (that will impact the search page, user page etc ...) -- There's a another way - that involves a greasemonkey's script -- check this post for more details.

Food collection

very nice collection of food, fruits and cones
can be found here
http://openclipart.org/media/files/Gerald_G/5858

Openclipart : Mythology

Orcs, Shaman, elves, warriors, egyptian's Gods look no further than the link below
Open Clip Art Library Tags mythology

Openclipart thumbnail

I couldnt find the option to add a thumbnail and couldnt find any help either.

But it was simple actually, just upload the png file
generated by a shell command like : for i in *.svg; do inkscape -f "$i" -e "$i.png" -w 80; done

And then put that png file in the first position and the thumbnail shows up