I love Inkscape.  I really do. I started using Inkscape when I was looking for an easier way to design the KitsapMaker logo for this year and didn’t want to use GIMP to trace over a hand-drawn sketch (yes, very neanderthal level, I know). I started out only being able to draw a circle and a box. Then I looked up some tutorials and learned how to make a gear (with a little built-in-render cheating). Before long I was throwing together gears like a pro and even doing some quick mock-ups for other projects, slowly finding new abilities of the program and learning how to do things I would have thought graphics wizardry before.

A while ago I volunteered, or butted in, to help with a project to create a desktop catapult (keep your eyes peeled, it’ll be making an appearance shortly) and in the process of drawing, redrawing and tweaking the design I learned quite a bit about many more of the apparently inexhaustible plethora of abilities that Inkscape has, like how to center objects on each other, dimensioning  using different units, and lots of other fun stuff. I had some more fun when I designed the graphics for the KitsapMaker T-shirts for the Kickstarter project we recently completed (you can see all of those designs here and look for the designs at this years Faire) .

My latest foray into Inkscape was  a selfish one. I got tired of looking at my wallpaper ( it was a fixie bike, I wanted a real bike with some knobby tires) but I liked the aesthetic. One day I realized that it looked kind of familiar and that it was kind of like a scalable vector graphic (Inkscape output file)! I immediately went to work drawing up a sweet set of wheels that I could stare at all day long and dream of riding. I probably doubled what I knew about inkscape by the time I finished the project, and had a great time doing it too. Because I want to share the awesome capabilities of Inkscape and I hope to inspire someone to learn something new I want to share my drawing, but only if you promise to go draw something yourself! (You can download Inkscape from their website)

(You can download the picture on my deviantart)