I’ve been using GIMP for some time now, mostly for work purposes, but I stumbled upon Inkscape. I thought it might be better suited for the kinds of illustration work I like to do and so I decided to give it a try. These are my first attempts.
First, I found a free-use photo of a gingko leaf and turned it into a bitmap line drawing.
OK. So that was fun and not too hard. What can I do with it? I played around with duplicating the image, changing the colors and made a few nice layouts.
Then I discovered the “tiling” tool. It helps create infinitely repeating patterns. There was a bit of a learning curve and many videos to watch before I figured it out.
This is slightly more than one tile, but the beauty here is that I can clip out exactly one tile and ‘clone’ it over and over and create an infinitely large background of ginkgo leaves at any scale (Inkscape creates vector art).
After using GIMP for so long, the ability to resize anything on a whim makes me almost giddy.
How far can I push it? The tiling ginkgo leaves are cool but not the hardest things to tile because they don’t have to match up precisely and there is empty space between them. Can I make a solid pattern?
It was definitely much harder, but I finally got this using the ‘spiral’ tool:
Again, I pulled slightly more than one tile, but yes! It works. This pattern can be repeated indefinitely in all directions.
So there it is. I started the challenge late and I’ve only got 4 pieces posted out of 21 days, but I will catch up!
