MileMarker 13: Explore New Technologies

Happy Monday! Last week in our Codes of the World meetup, we downloaded and kicked the tires of Vextractor, a centerline tracing tool that converts raster images to vector art (HT: Nina Paley). Vextractor is unique in that it traces the art using the centerline method as opposed to the outline method used by both Inkscape and Illustrator. This is an important distinction since it makes editing the Bézier paths much easier once the scan has been traced. There are many caveats, of course – the first being that one must have excellent source art to begin with. This is certainly not the case with the vast majority of the art we are working with at #rdcHQ! Also, many of the technical illustrations are far too detailed to render properly with the limited settings of Vextractor. Our Codes of the World experts (a.k.a Jasper and Levi) are deep in the mines this week running some benchmarks to see if this tool can help with some of the simple illustrations in our queue.

More news as it develops from #rdcHQ

A New Logo For KPOZ-FM

Greetings from #rdcHQ! In our deBUG Days Track, we have been working with our friends at KPOZ-FM Coastal Community Radio. Graphics Wizard and RDC Veteran Levi Thompson created this new logo for our local community radio station modeled after a compass rose. We’re looking forward to seeing it crop up around town (Port Orford, OR) as well as on the web! You can keep up-to-date with all of the news about KPOZ-FM on the air and at their web site.

Life on a Redwood Post — Posters by Scott Peden

In Life on a Redwood Post news, We’ll be making a special signed edition of Scott Peden’s “Champion Redwood” poster available soon in the Buy Our Stuff section of our site. Fans of the RDC may remember this poster from our WWW movie debut: “The Beginning of the Sustainable World.” We want to raise awareness of Scott’s wonderful work as a photographer, author and champion of insects everywhere! Expect more development in this track after the summer program, although we’ll have a report from the field when Henry Cowell Bug Walk takes place on July 13.

As always, we’ll keep you posted of our progress right here at #rdcHQ!

Aloha! In today’s meetup, the Crew had a little fun creating characters to fill in a couple of gaps in the storyline. It was a great opportunity to practice illustration skills, as well as create derivative works using open clip art resources (like the fabulous Openclipart) for less central items in our scenery, such as plants and other background objects. Shown at right is the basis for stemlock, a magical type of plant that can keep something secure and can even lock creatures inside the structure … Spooky!

MileMarker 9: Create an Exploding Cow in SVG

The Crew created a really fun rendition of their own exploding cow based on this work by marion_c at deviantart. Using the original art as a base template, Evelyn J. practiced creating fully enclosed shapes (so they can readily be filled with a color) and using the pencil and bezier pen tool.

For the past couple of weeks, the Crew have been improving techniques in Anime Studio Pro and Toon Boom Studio using the Bones feature, as evidenced in the animation short of TJ the Werewolf (shown below in his far less menacing, alterego fawn pug form) —

MileMarker 10: Create A Bones Animation

We’re pretty excited that we will have a new mentor joining us in July to work with the Cobwebs Crew in Blender and multimedia animation techniques — we welcome Jerry McManus to the Rural Design Collective this summer. … Stay tuned!

Hola! In our “Codes of the World” Track, this week we focused on creating simple graphics using layering and cloning techniques that are useful when elements are repeated in an illustration. This technique is readily apparent in this simple line art diagram entitled “Fan Rotation & Discharge Positions”

MileMarker 7: Working with Layers

Each one of these diagrams is created using five simple shapes: 1. the basic outline; 2. the basic outline, cloned; 3. the foci; 4. a clipping mask; and 5. the base. By layering these elements and rotating/reflecting the outline we are able to create the shapes shown in the diagram above.

MileMarker 8: Cloning Elements

The following #rdcHQ tutorial short illustrates how to reflect and clone the shapes above once they have been layered. This particular tutorial shows how to do this in Adobe Illustrator CS5, however the same functionality exists in the open source and freely available Inkscape. We’ll create a tutorial for that at a later date.

Many of these basic techniques carry over into our Cobwebs College animation work – we’ll cover more this summer at #rdcHQ. Stay tuned!