DoctorMo's Blog

If you thought DebConf was all about programming and art was all about being a loner huddled over a computer with a stylus in one hand and a cappuccino in the other, then think again! This was a collaborative art session I ran this evening at DebConf using inkscape and my Wacom Intuos 3. Involved in drawing were myself of the Ubuntu community, Ian Molton of Debian from the UK and Paul Liu of the Canonical OEM team from Taiwan. Each person did a a part of the process and we learned together how we each did out part:

A number of people were influenced to try out inkscape and their pressure sensitive input devices. So I deem this collaborative art a success!

Some folks were finding it hard to get a hold of the new ubuntu branded icons for each official release:

I’ve added a joker in there too because I was bored while packaging. Find the tar from the download button.

This is my entrant into the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase, it’s a wallpaper made in inkscape currently in widescreen format.

This image brought to use by FLOSS:

Open and Responsible in the Herd.

This is a howto for all those making Ubuntu Day graphics and slide shows for how you can drag and drop your clipart from template sets into inkscape as you would in programs like Dia or Visio:

View Video on Blip

Enjoy.

One of my many jobs in the community is to bring you lovely Ubuntu planet readers some of the wonderful art works that are created using Ubuntu and the FOSS tools we have in the repositories, all these works come from the Ubuntu deviantArt group. These are my picks for the month of march:

If you or someone you know is a good artist and would like to show off their work in our featured gallery. Do join up at our deviantArt group’s front page and start submitting work to the favourites and the galleries.

As promised yesterday, here is the calendar for 2010 without personal dates:

Hope you all had a good new year.

I wrote this nifty script in python to take the output from the cal command and parse it, using an svg template it outputs an entire calendar in your own style, with your own pictures and everything.

It was a bit rushed because I was making a personal calendar for my wife with birthdays, anniversaries and our family pictures on it. And it came out really well too, she’s very happy with it! Here is a page from the calendar:

A big shout out to Inkscape, which again was flexible enough to allow me to create my calendar template without complaining about missing images or custom svg xml. If you want to have a go yourself at making a calendar then just download the following package:

calendar-creator.tar.bz2

Populate the flips directory with your own png files 01.png – 12.png and a title.png file for the front page, add any extra dates you want to the dates.lst, then run `./create-cal.py 2010` on the command line this will make a whole set of svg files for each page. You can then run `./make-book.sh` which will use inkscape (make sure it’s installed) to generate png files of each page.

Once you have your images, you can print them out in order or create a pdf of them using imagemagik’s convert command: `convert pngs/*.png full-calendar.pdf` but be aware this file might get big and generating these things takes time.

I will post a complete calendar tomorrow.

Recently I’ve gotten to grips with using Clipping Masks in inkscape (Object > Clip > Set / Release) this feature allows an artist to create a complex picture which bleeds out over it’s intended boundary but then to have it’s boundary cut short later by a defining shape.

I have to say I’m quit fond of the clipping and masking techniques now. I’m sure I’ll be using it much more in future works. For instance I used it to make this google ad-words type image for our Anime Boston event (see image right).

What do you think of all the advanced features in inkscape?

If you’ve been having a go at some of the new features of Ubuntu Karmic, and one of the programs you take advantage of is Inkscape. You’ll notice there are a whole host of filters that are now available.

To help understand some of these effects, c-quel who helped on the Ubunchu project with translations, organisation and editing, has put together a wonderful guide that shows each of the filter effects in action. Check it out:

I had the very good pleasure today of meeting with Joe Golden of the old Green Mountain Linux company up in Vermont. He expressed to me a strong desire to help people get in touch with Free and Open Source ideals and importantly get people to recognise the community efforts that go into making all this great software.

So I had a bit of a think, some of my in-laws up there took me to the local farmers market. It’s a great market if you’ve never been to Burlington town center, lots of fresh produce, cider, wine, bread, excellent stuff.

Well they’re involved with the Diggers Mirth farming cooperative where they all get involved and all get to share the rewards for their hard work. The food is even sold in the local supermarket.

So since people obviously value food cooperatives, why not explain the software that we write in those terms?

To experiment a bit and see what kind of results this could turn up, I’ve drafted a simple, alpha quality leaflet which could be used at markets such as these as well as other places such as libraries or whole food type supermarkets:

Update: I’ve updated it to version 2.1, to fix a whole bunch of issues reported in my comments section.

Update: Download svg on deviantArt, click image for link through. also licence terms are specified.