Man On A Street

[Note: This was first published as a Facebook Note on July 7, 2015 . I am making it available here to add to the Inkscape tutorials.] Tired of waiting for Facebook to put out an app where you can overlay a country flag’s colors on your profile pic to show your sympathy? Why not make your own? Inkscape easily allows you to do that. But that means you’ll need to spend some time learning how to use a vector graphics program, if you don’t know how to yet. Inkscape is a simple-looking vector graphics program and it only outputs to PNG , but you can carry it as a portable app on a USB pen drive. Here’s how your Inkscape-made profile pic can look: (Featuring the face of Carl Nilsson-Polias , one of Google Search’s most famous faces – his face is among the top results when you Google ‘profile picture’ . 😝 You’ll need: A computer with internet access – desktop or laptop; Inkscape – you can install on your PC or just download the portable version (or, for Mac OS users, follow these s

[Note: This was first published as a Facebook Note on January 29, 2016 . I am making it available here to add to the Inkscape pattern tutorials.] This is based on a tutorial for making hexagonal tiles for David White’s “The Battle for Wesnoth”, but you can skip the 72×72-pixel requirement. You can make your base hexagon in any size that looks good at 100% zoom. First, make a hexagon using the “Create stars and polygons” tool. Press the CTRL key while you’re dragging the cursor to make a proportioned hexagon like this: You may have to move the cursor around to have the hexagon lie on its side. Next, with the hexagon selected, remove the outline by holding SHIFT and left-clicking the ‘X’ swatch in the color palette: Replace the hexagon’s color with what you want by left-clicking the color swatches in the color palette – almost black, in this case: Next, add your main decoration. I just dropped-in a dragon I found at Wikimedia Commons: Group the hexagon and the object (selec

[Note: This was first published as a Facebook Note on January 3, 2016. I'm making it available here to add to the Inkscape pattern tutorials collection. Here's Part 2 and Part 1 .] I must have been bitten by the pattern bug because I’m at it again (and it took more than a year for me to make a second post on repeating Chinese patterns and here I am, days later, with a third). I’ve been wanting to try, for some time now, to make a repeating tile for this lattice pattern from the set of The Legend of Zhen Huan (aka Empresses in the Palace). (Thanks to My Drama Tea for the screen capture) It’s a very distinct styling for the Palace of Broken Jade (where earlier scenes of the story took place – gorgeous, gorgeous costumes, by the way). Broken, shattered, ... very appropriate. There appears to be no repeating tile pattern to it. I just found out, a few days ago (while making Part 2 ), that this Chinese lattice style is called a Type II “ ice-ray ” (click here for more ty