365 sketches

By: lemasney

Mar 25 2010

Tags: Bubble tea, Calligraphy, Face, Graphics, Inkscape, Portrait, Sarah Badawy, Vector Based

Category: 365, Calligraphy Tool, faces, Node Tool, Rectangle Tool, requests, Shape Tool, Simplify, Trace Bitmap

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Hey, all. This one was fun. Sarah, who is a long time worker for me, but also a supportive friend and confidant, was nice enough to share a picture for the 365 sketches project. I had a short conversation about what she was looking for, and she mentioned that she liked my self portrait with a scowl, because it had a Japanese emoticon styled face, which I really only subtly realized when I made it. She often uses reversed or japanese styled icons in her emails, and the way she writes and types really is one of the tiny but many fun and interesting aspects of her persona.

Sarah Badawy

With this in mind, in Inkscape, I imported her donated image, bitmap traced it, and removed some background elements, all of her facial features, and a cup of bubble tea that she’s drinking in the original photo. I simplified the nodes, which numbered over 8,000, resulting in just over 1,000 nodes. Using the calligraphy brush set very thin, I added a line to create a shirt, and another to create a chin, neither of which emerged from the bitmap trace.  With a thicker brush size and less opacity, I added color for her hair, shirt, jacket, foreground and background. I added a star using the shape tool. Finally, I created her facial features with the text tool. Thanks for the image Sarah, I hope you like what I did with it!

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• 45 of 365 is a self portrait with a scowl #inkscape (365sketches.wordpress.com)