Designing and Using Brushes in Inkscape

inkscape-brushes-alt

With version 0.46, Inkscape released a new feature called “pattern along path”, which amounts to what you would call brushes in Adobe Illustrator. Although there are a few big differences in using brushes in Inkscape, it’s relatively easy to get the hang. I’ll walk you though how make and use brushes for your drawings.

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Redesign

I’ll be returning to Tucson in less than two months and had some time to give the Tucsonlabs a clean redesign.

For this particular design, I chose to use a much wider layout than I previously used. I also made it both a fixed-width three column layout and a fixed-width two column for a few pages. I completely redesigned the structure of the homepage, design page, contact page, and articles page. For the articles and about pages, I chose to use a two column layout that was fairly similar to the previous design. I updated the logo slightly, and I ditched the adobe house (the lab) in favor of the lone saguaro. I still have a lot of little things I’d like to implement, but I thought I better get out what I had now and make small additions down the road. I’d say it’s about 95% complete. Please let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions.

Long time, no post.

I’ve been keeping busy with work and have been doing a lot of traveling and sight seeing.

Callie and I went visited Hokkaido for holiday which was amazing. Here are some pics.

Callie is stoked to have a huge backpack and an empty train.

This was pre longest-local-train-ride ever, so Callie was still in a pretty good mood. Actually, she really didn’t even mind the 24 hour trip from Sapporo to Tokyo. I did not fair so well.

Random train stop in Hokkaido was pretty - Kita Funaoka

This was a random stop on our way to Sapporo. It was right next to the beach.

Volcano near Lake Toya

Lake Toya is a spectacular area to visit. They had hosted the G8 conference here shortly before our trip.

Ubuntu 8.04 Released

My overall impression of Hardy Heron is that it didn’t spend a long enough time in beta testing and was released too early.

Way too early. Last I checked Firefox 3 was still in Beta, and to me this says a lot about the current release. I can’t really go into detail about all of the bugs with this release because there are more than I have time to right about. In general I think that the Ubuntu team was a little to ambitious with this release and it really makes me wonder about the future of Ubuntu and the practicality of 6 month release cycles with the amount of new features they’re trying to push. I’m getting a far better experience on Debian Lenny (which is still in beta testing) in terms of stability, boot speed, and general system performance than I am with this RTM version 8.04 of Ubuntu. Those are just my thoughts, feel free to comment.

Life In Japan Update

I’m really enjoying certain aspects of being a salary man; easy, fulfilling work, short working hours, nice pay check. Unfortunately, I’m really hating my commute. Generally it’s a 4 hour round trip trek to and from work, which is really draining in and of itself. I get by though, reminding myself that it could actually be worse (i.e., driving to work), and I get to take this time to read or study. My Japanese is coming along, but my working hours are preventing me from taking any actual courses and leaving me pretty much exhausted by the end of the night. I’m looking forward to an upcoming trip to Kyoto when my sister comes to visit next week!

Inkscape 0.46

Inkscape 0.46 has finally been released. There are a lot of new features packed into this latest version. My favorite being that the tool palettes can now be docked, which is a huge improvement in the user interface in my opinion. There are a lot of other new additions to this release that I’ll be testing out in the near future, in the mean time, head over to the <a href=”http://inkscape.org”> Inkscape website </a> to get a free copy.