November 14, 2010

 

The leaves of Fall

http://huffmania.com/blog/uploaded_images/leaf_piles.jpg
Fall is one of my favorite seasons. I like the cooler temperatures, the change in the leaves. (Not to mention: scary movies, post-season baseball, bonfires, and so on ...). Today as I was walking to get some coffee and the leaves all over the ground inspired me to make some vector leaves with Inkscape, which is definitely one of my favorite free open-source programs.

Inkscape is very similar to Adobe Illustrator in its functions and capabilities. Although its somewhat limited in capability compared with Illustrator (it doesn’t have all the fancy brushes and what not), it just takes a little imagination to work around those, and it certainly makes up for capabilities by being free/open-source.

http://huffmania.com/blog/uploaded_images/vector_leaf_demonstration.jpg

To make vector leaves, I just created some rectangles and various oval shapes and used the Path>Difference command to make one side of the leaf. Then I copied it, inverted it horizontally, used the Align and Distribute properties to line them up, and used the Path>Union command to combine them into one shape. I used the same procedure to create a stem for the leaf...

Labels: ,


link to this post - posted by Jonathan @ 8:14 PM -