Inkscape Epiphany!

So, I am not a very techy person, and neither am I a professional artist or craftsperson, so when it came to getting my drawings from my pencil to my printer I relied, not a lot but ENTIRELY, on drawing-scanning-printing (at a pale setting)-drawing over-rescanning-reprinting-redrawing-rescanning-reprinting....ad nauseum. Finally I would print my image to an A4 size, painstakingly draw over all of the rough edges with a dark ink biro, rescan it and resize it, and that was the only way I could get all the lines to have a uniform, smooth black finish, with no 'pixels' or grey spots. I knew it was ridiculous, and tried to use photoshop even just to get all the lines the same black colour, but found it really difficult and frustrating.
And then I found a video on Youtube describing how to turn a bitmap image into a vector image using a free program, Inkscape (upload your image, select it, click 'Path' from the top menu, then 'Trace Bitmap'. It drops the new image right on top of the original, so pull it aside to see how it came out and fiddle the numbers until you are happy). Bitmaps and vectors mean nothing to me, but I realised that they were saying I could put my drawing into this program and with the click of a single button (kinda!) could make it so I would never have jagged, pixelated lines again, no matter how little or large I make my image. All I ever wanted were neat straight lines!
Well, Inkscape delivered. Here's a pic of the Evolution of an Image, from my painfully simple I-can't-go-through-all-that-again pre-Inkscape hand drawing, to the final Inkscape-tastic piece...and yes I do say so myself, just look how sad the first one is!!!

I was really surprised that I caught onto Inkscape 'so easily' = at all!, because as I say the trial photoshop frustrated me so much that if Inkscape hadn't been free I just wouldn't have tried it. Meanwhile I have been working on a design for a t-shirt - it was complex, detailed, difficult...and I enjoyed it so much I made a second as well. That's for a separate post though - I bought a screen printing kit online and have yet to see how well it works. Oh yeah, I have never screenprinted before either!

Avalanche of Embossed Cards!

I am taking my hopes to be a little more pro-active with the cards seriously, happily! These are all just the different permutations of the Connemara series, combining all three images with the different messages and both silver and gold embossing...phew!
It means listings may be a little monotonous for a while, but I'll feel better, in that princess and the pea way!, knowing that I have given them a good shot. I like these cards, they are certainly simple, but I worked hard on the images and they mean a lot to me as my first cards - the first things I'd admitted to making much less trying to sell! I'm planning to list every second day, which is still a world away from what I was doing, totally ad hoc, but still isn't setting myself up to fail :p

Growing pains

So I'm happy with the images, the paper/card, the 'design', the embossing idea and the end result...and the pictures look absolutely crap! Grr!
I did what I have read recommended: put taking the pictures off for three days until I had the time to do it in the morning light; changed the white balance on my sister's beautiful new camera; USED my sister's beautiful new camera - a panasonic lumix (sumthinsumthin), 8 optical zoom, 12 megapixel wonder machine...colour Blue! How could it fail?!
And yet, they all look awful. My only idea is to try taking them beside the big sliding door windows, as opposed to under the velux window upstairs, which I was convinced was a touch of genius by the way!
FINAL straw to be clutched at: it was pouring rain that day...although having said that when is it NOT going to be overcast during an Irish December?!

No. 3: Traditional Dry Stone Wall

This was the simplest drawing so far, and does it show? Is it enough? Although there are only so many ways to do a line drawing of a bunch of rocks piled on top of each other!

Who-ker Improvement

Is it, an improvement?
Ah well, what would really cement its who-ker-ness would be colouring in the sails the traditional deep red/brown colour...but I am curtailed by my artistic determination to keep the images to simple line drawings. Amn't I?!
But dammit anyway if that little sailor-man doesn't look absolutely ridiculous, pffffff :(

RESULT

Well, it isn't that dramatic really, in fact it's quite anti-climactic - or is it just that I am AWFUL at lighting for photographs?!
Anyway, these are a few attempts at different coloured cards and papers. I also had a simpler idea for the layout - I mean, I have limited ambition and imagination so I'm just printing the images and text using my cheap old laser printer, which obviously doesn't print on card. Sooooo, I want to combine the printed paper with the card, and I did it by cutting slots in the card and weaving the paper through to hold it in place; in these photographed cards there are 5 cut slots, so that the image is framed on the front of the card and the message is framed on the inside of the card, using one piece of paper printed both sides and no glue or other fiddly bits. The simpler version has just one slot cut into the crease of the card, and the paper slipped through.

I thought I was being smart and creative...but is it just silly?!