Here in Japan the 12-year Chinese horoscope assigns an animal to each year in the cycle. Last year was the year of the rabbit and this year it’s the dragon. There are a lot of New Year cards with cute dragons on them and traditional Chinese style dragons. I’ve gone about half way between the two with my illustration. Happy New Year!

For this post I went back to my roots, watching an old screencast by HEATHENX. For some reason, I’m into star stickers and bottle caps at the moment and I remembered this tutorial. First time round I was still not used to Inkscape and found it too hard. But it just shows if you stick with it for a while you’re bound to improve.

I took the Inkscape vector (top) and opened it in GIMP. I dragged in a grungemap and masked the label part on the grungemap layer. Then I changed the layer mode to overlay. That’s all.

After cutting real paper to make paper art Christmas cards for the kids at my school I got a taste for it and started searching the net for examples.

One of these images is paper art by a design company called Bomboland. I liked this image a lot and thought it could also be done as a vector, for good or for bad.

Each shape has a subtle gradient and most of the shadows were done with the fantastic drop shadow filter (FILTER> SHADOWS AND GLOWS> DROP SHADOW) which means that your shadow will follow its object around just like yours. Of course the 3D distortion of shadows (e.g. on the clouds by the funnel) were done by hand with node sculpting.

The are many natural layers of paper in the original image and it requires lots of Inkscape layers to organise this image.

I think I did a pretty good job of showing it can be done in Inkscape. I think I’ll return to this one and add some paper texture and lighting effects in GIMP.

I added a tree from a set of tree brushes, some lighting and a lens flare. I also used a motion blur on the falling snow.

I’ve been wanting to try out this tutorial for ages but couldn’t seem to get around to it. It’s PA BLOG’s Cool Typography Design Poster in Gimp tutorial. Go check it out and try it yourself.

You can learn a lot about layers and blend modes, gradient fill, speeding up your work and adding photographic details with brushes and design principles.

I couldn’t let Halloween pass uncelebrated though. This is the equivalent of stream of consciousness. I had no plan and did this in a very short time. Coyotes dancing in the moonlight!

Happy Halloween!

Aloha! I’m into all things Hawaiian at the moment. I wanted to put together something that evokes Hawaii so I chose beaches, palms, waves and surf boards! This post is about theme rather than technique but basically I did a “trace bitmap” on a beach scene, waves and surfboards and chose a colour scheme. Surf over to DaFont.com and do a search on Hawaii and you’ll find “Hawaiian Lover” and “Hawaiian Punk” which are the typefaces I used.

Another Hawaiian typeface I like but didn’t use here is called “Hawaiian Aloha BTN”. Check it out. Hang loose and mahalo!