We challenge you to:

Let us know where you get stuck and help others where you can.

This challenge is a community project. Share any graphic(s) or idea(s) that you would like tips or help on and, where you can, get stuck in and help someone else.

YOU DON'T NEED TO BE AN EXPERT TO HELP!

This is a great challenge to join in with if you have never tried one before.

If you are new to Inkscape, feel free to keep it simple.

Multiple entries are welcome, and please do stick around for the chat!

All abilities are invited to get involved. The complexity of your entry is down to you.

Please post your finished artwork below. 

IMPORTANT: If you would like to know what you could do to improve your artwork, add the phrase to your comment: "Brutal Feedback" --- only for those with nerves of steel! (Please include a brief description of your process, difficulties you have experienced and your desired outcome).

Because of limited resources, moderators may not always be able to give feedback.

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#inkscapechallenge

Please see CHALLENGE RULES before submitting your artwork

Instructions/Information

• To submit your artwork, scroll to the bottom of the page and while logged in, click the paperclip (bottom-left) to upload your image, add a description in the text box (optional) and click "Submit Reply".
• If you'd like to post work-in-progress artwork, create a thread in the "Work in Progress" section of the forum, and post your images there, with the title "[Month] [Year] [Challenge Title] WIP - [your artwork title]" (you are welcome to ask for help there if you get stuck). When finished, post the final graphic to this thread.
• There are no winners (HOWEVER, WE MAY SHARE ARTWORK WHICH STANDS OUT WITH THE INKSCAPE COMMUNITY). These challenges are intended to inspire, to encourage you to share your work and to build a supportive community.
• If you post your artwork here, you agree for us to share your artwork and use your artwork to create a banner for social media - to opt out, add "Please don't share" to your post.
• Please don't post artwork containing AI generated graphics. as it can be hard to see what you (the artist) has produced using Inkscape.
• You're encouraged to discuss and offer feedback/constructive criticism to others, but please be respectful.
• Most importantly, be creative, give your best, and have fun!

We look forward to seeing your entries!

Challenge entries (so far)

I enjoy drawing animals. However, I feel that my workflow for drawing fur using the graphics tablet is clunky (and time consuming). The animal banners I have drawn for the challenge took far longer than other graphics. Using brushes with the pencil tool and a graphics tablet feels unintuitive and buggy. The default behavior for the pencil tool leaves the path 'live' so I end up accidentally joining my strokes together. Also, changing brush isn't quick or simple (it usually involves zooming out to select and copy a brush from my custom brush panel at the side of the page and, therefore, losing my place). While I think a brush dialog and brush tool would be a dream feature, I wonder if anyone uses a graphics tablet and if they have a comfortable process?

Interesting @pacer! I don't have a tablet but thinking of developing a similar style to drawing fur. 

My go to method is/was using the spray tool to make tons of copies, then use the tweak tool to nudge the position and change the lightness value of the fill. 

However the tweak tool is sloooow and isn't so effective. On top of that, even at the strength the results are lagging. 

Used this kind of method here: https://openclipart.org/detail/217160/black-cat

(Was it for another challenge? Who remembers. Maybe it can be looked up in Brynn's late forum.

The mask challenge definitely had some fur going on, of which was a bit different.

Will dig that up later if interested.)

This one also used the spray and tweak tool -despite not being a fur  https://media.inkscape.org/media/resources/file/spring-screenshot_4YKOXf5.png

https://inkscape.org/forums/competitions/inkscape-challenge-1-march-2022-31-march-2022/#c39483

My problem here is how to make the strokes "pop", and not just look as a flat texture.

On the fur side, made this fur filter pack before: https://openclipart.org/detail/292007/fur-pack

For the out of focus parts using similar chunks of textures as a base seems way more effective than drawing each hair one by one.

Recently for the about screen contest I was experimenting with using gimp to draw and tracing the result in inkscape. 

That paint tool is much more fluent and offers so much more control of which in inkscape would be resource heavy.

Issue is to separate each stroke for a proper trace bitmap in inkscape, and that the stroke ordering can hardly represent a fur/scale pattern.

But since gimp is also foss, maybe it could be the first step for integrating raster brushes in inkscape. 

A raster based brush that autotraces every stroke upon finish.

That is a good looking cat @Lazur

The fur is quite realistic looking.

The fur pack also looks good. Definitely an option for someone looking for a filter.

I like to draw fur and hair because it is difficult and it feels rewarding to do.

Aside from a brush panel, I would like a way to rotate colours when drawing without the jarring and time consuming process of selecting a colour every few strokes.

I was thinking of something like this:

Taken from my comment in team_ux:
"Imagine you were drawing fur/hair with the pencil tool. You want some variance to the colors of the strokes without having to select a color for every few strokes. The idea is that, for example, the next line would have a 20% chance of being purple, a 16% chance of being blue and a 40% chance of being green..."

---

Or, at the very least... keyboard shortcuts for colours.

First impression of that feature is it's more like a random select thing.

In blender, you can random select by a given percentage. 

If you random select objects by 20%, you can then change the fill colour. 

It's not an exact match to your suggestion though as more random selections would overlap. 

Still, you can sort-of do "pseudo" a random selection in inkscape already.

Select all those objects, then go to the align and distribute panel for a random placement. 

Then, rectangle select a number of objects out of the selection. 

Undo the previous alignment with Ctrl+Z. Then you'll end up with a random number of objects selected.

Anyway, will try that filter pack in action to see how it works.

@Lazur Just tried your trick and it works! You are very knowledgeable, thank you.

What do you think will happen if I do this to hundreds of paths? I'm thinking it might struggle, but it's worth a try,

Maybe I will have to do it in small sections.

Thank's! It's more like how I'd push the limited toolset that I know of towards a solution. There are plenty of features (since 0.49) that I'm less familiar with.

Suspecting that method will perform better than the tweak tool. If those objects are clones then it should be like a breeze.

If performance is an issue, switching individual strokes to clones of like a dozen different ones max is advised. 

@pacer This isn't quite realistic, but just wanted to drop it in, for the fur topic: https://vektorrascheln.de/photos/artwork-gallery/kunst_markerspiele.jpg using markers and adding lots of nodes to make it fuller. Maybe it's useful to someone.

@Moini That's nice. I think the white one would make a good tail. Thanks for sharing!

@Moini This white fur brush example, is certainly useful to me.😺

Beleive it or not, made this back in 2014 -for the mask challenge at the Inkscape Community forum by Brynn. 

While the fur seems challenging, that horn was way more tedious as i remember. 

For the shading, used blurred objects. Maybe not enough, some details look off. 

Today I'd use alot more filtering and probably mesh gradients to recreate such an image.  

Also attaching a screenshot of experimenting with different fur patterns.

Hmm always having problem attaching the image in the preferred way. Sorry for the double post, attaching the previous one again at a larger resolution (editing the previous post didn't work).

@Lazur Certainly, some fine-tuning would’ve made the whole project look even better. Nevertheless, it’s still impressive!

@Lazur i love the soften look of the lower one, is it a blur? 

This was an old abandoned personal project, i was trying to make gold ink / silver ink, and more dynamic like acrylic pour / fluid art, but it turn out flat, and nothing like a fluid art. 

The test 2 was done with the watercolor filters. 

I would love to get some feedback and help, thank you

@rosa0123 That sounds interesting. Happy to take a look into this.
Could you please post a picture of something like the effect you are looking to achieve?

rosa0123

@Lazur i love the soften look of the lower one, is it a blur? 

Used different proportions there of the main "strokes". They are much thinner and thus the result is more dense.

Was trying to avoid filtering as much as possible for each hair to speed up the rendering. A diffuse filter probably would result in a better look -instead they all have gradient fills only.

For a liquid effect and using filtering, the options are limited quite a bit. 

Basically you want someform of displacement to take effect. 

The displacement filter primitive is the obvious choice there. A problem there is it's hard-wired to 100 px displacement max. 

Any more and it becomes visible how the bitrange of filter effects are only 256 values without any float inbetween.

The second problem is with generating the input for the displacement. 

Can use only turbulence/fractal noise. Certainly you can create a fluid look, but there won't be any swirls or meandering patterns.

Will give it a go later. 

Till then, here is a "liquid lightning bolt":

https://openclipart.org/download/287483/1506176424.svg

Quick liquid filter example.

The svg file is available here:

https://openclipart.org/detail/348150/liquid-displacement-filter

and here is a variant of it:

https://openclipart.org/detail/348151/liquid-displacement-filter 

Reminds me of aerial photos of river deltas...

@pacer, here is some samples from pexels, all photos by Turgay Koca

@Lazur the filter pack is interesting, i will try to make swirls and apply the filters and experiment with them when i have some time. thank you for sharing

@rosa0123 glad you like them. So much can be done with a static fractal noise. 

Your examples look more like marble paper which isn't built on a homogeneous noise but on human interaction. 

Here is an old video demonstrating the process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyga8VMWXKg

Probably touchdesigner would be the most suiting tool for this kind of stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltwHr_TdpYE

Blender and houdini may do a decent job at it as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_vnAz0Yo8w

@rosa0123

This doesn't do much for texture but may give you a starting point for shape.

For this, I created the shape on the left and used the spiro path with the pen tool to draw a curvy line.

I then applied the shape on the left to the curved path using the "pattern-along-path" LPE

I don't know if this is useful.

Here, I have used the same technique, as above, with a duplicated layer. I used dynamic offset (to shrink proportionately) on the duplicated layer and shifted it slightly to the top-right.

Glitter effect was added with the spray tool and clipped to the highlighted area using another duplicate as a clip group.

Highlights were drawn manually.

The effect could be made to look more flat by reducing the contrast between layers.

@Pacer thank you so much, with the right color it might just look like gold liquid ink.

Lazur

Probably touchdesigner would be the most suiting tool for this kind of stuff.

Just came across this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioumvyPsDyQ

(Was uploaded a little less than an hour ago; what a coincidence.)

I’m not an artist, my drawings are more techy: icons, sometimes fonts. Where Inkscape’s usability is abysmal.

1. When I need to draw several curves with similar styles, I can’t figure out how Inkscape chooses default style and how to change it. I just set every curve’s style one by one.
2. I often resize toolbar when I don’t want to. Add a small resize corner I cannot falsely press.
3. Hand-drawn patterns involving clip paths — adding a clip makes OUTER object virtually uneditable.
4. Need automation functions: Intersect instead of clipping, Make all clones Level 1. That’s for limited engines, Qt and Wikipedia respectively.
5. Need some toolkit for pixel alignment of lines having non-zero thickness.
6. Need a tool (script, LPE) that turns any curve (even finely drawn with mouse) to calligraphic stroke.
7. Have a “bad” curve, both nodes are cusp. Sometimes need to make it smooth without touching neighbouring curves.

These are just usability issues.

@Mercury13:

1. If you double click the tool's icon, it will pop up the related part in the settings (Shift+Ctrl+P). There you can set up a default style from a selected object.
2. Gui is a mess imho, also having some struggles on many parts.
3. Before converting a clipped path to a pattern, try grouping instead. For example, you can draw a simple rectangle, group it, then create a clone of it. Convert the clone to a pattern fill. The base tile size of the pattern fill will be inherited from that very appearance of the clone. Then you can enter the parent group and add in objects you like, and delete the rectangle. Need to check, but as far as I know you don't even need clipping. If not, it's enough to clip the group and you can still enter and modify objects inside. Either way, this method can be used with older versions, without the upgraded pattern settings.
4. Description is a bit vague. For the most part, clipping can result in pixel perfect rendering with all parts overlapping, while Booleans like intersecting can lead to the gap issue with anti-aliasing. 
5. As far as I know there is an extension to nudge nodes onto even coordinates and there is the grid function you can set up for drawing. However that doesn't mean the result won't be "smudged" on diagonals or fraction px stroke widths. There is the pixellate filter which can help brute-force get rid of the anti-aliasing and if you export at double size, can scale down the image manually -"manual super sampling". Needs some testing which works best for you.
6. Depending on your needs -i.e. you want to work with fills or strokes- you can try the powerstroke lpe (using fills) or use heavy transformation to work with strokes only -as with a fixed angle flat nibbed pen. I'd also love to see a feature like kalliculator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXLWQpjizG0
7. May need some clarification. If you have "double nodes", selectn them, unconnect the nodes and click the merge nodes icon and preferably turn the result into a smooth node.

Hope some of those match.

@Lazur:

3. I don’t mean pattern fill. For example, I draw some hat and a ribbon over it. And the ribbon should be inside hat.

4. Yes, clipping is pixel-perfect, but what if target engine does not support clip (respectively clones of clones) AT ALL? Yes, that’s a workaround, but a very frequent workaround.

6. Calliculator is cool.

7. Many scenarios. 1) Straight in the middle of the curve — a frequent result of TTF optimization. 2) Manual simplification went wrong.

3.

Copy&paste to an empty document an object with  the pattern fill, then change the parent in the original file.

Then paste back from the other document. It may work -needs some testing-. As far as I remember it breaks the clone link and creates a new pattern fill definition, but can be wrong.

From that hat example it sounds it may not be the best option to use pattern fill for the task -like, do you really need to repeat a pattern with a specific hat depicted over it?

4.

Avoid cloning clones like the plague. They get extra laggy. 

Hi. I'm doing this illustration for a challenge in an Inkscape Discord. I'd like to keep it simple, but I think I'm stuck. A little feedback is appreciated :) The biggest problem for me is the hands, I don't want anything realistic, but believable and I'm not really achieving it 😄  

I must say that the vegetation is not mine, it's from a pack that Logos by Nick shared some time ago.

@mrks9

If the only light source is behind the subject, the near side of the subject would be in darkness. If you want to light the subject with a second light source, it is best to decide where that is. If it were to the left of the artwork, any fingers would have a shadow on their right side. If your shadows are flat the object will appear angular/blocky (less realistic). Use gradients to demonstrate curves.

In my opinion lighting makes all the difference whether the goal is realism or cartoon.
Hands and fingers are just a group of objects. Without lighting they are flat. With good lighting they take shape.

If it helps, I might make a short video showing how I would approach lighting an object?

Thank you, @pacer. Lighting is always a problem in my case, as I don't like to use gradients in general for this type of illustration. I know it's the convenient thing to do, but I feel like to make them work you have to use them everywhere. I've always liked the flat illustration style, but you're right about the hands and that sort of thing, without effects they're just overlapping blobs :). I'll keep trying the way I know how, that is, looking and looking at references and trying to fit them to what I want. I'll try it with gradients on the hands to start with. Thanks again.