My colleague Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues thought it would be nice for Autotest to have a fancy logo. He came up with a great concept – a robotic arm pulling Tux upwards:
He asked me for a bit of help in spicing it up. I came up with a couple of sketches using MyPaint in Fedora:
We both agreed the original concept was strongest. So here it is, hopefully all done up real purdy-like:
What I did was to import the original MyPaint sketch as a flat PNG in Inkscape, save it on a layer, then I locked that layer. I created a new layer, and very carefully used the calligraphy tool with my tablet to trace a clean outline of the penguin. I went back in another couple of passes and thickened the external parts of the outline, and segments of the outline I wanted to pop out more (like his right leg.) Then I created another layer for the robotic arm and did the same. Finally, I created yet another layer, for the fills, moved it to the bottom of the layers stack (deleting the original sketch layer), and using Inkscape’s fill tool to fill in a base color for each area to be colored. Finally, I did another pass over all the fills, adding gradients as necessary to make them pop a bit more.
Previously I would sketch ideas out on paper and scan them in, importing the scans into Inkscape. Since I’ve discovered MyPaint, my process in doing quick designs like this has gone entirely digital. It just has that right feel I couldn’t get in Inkscape for sketching.
I hope Lucas likes the final result. 🙂 These and more related Autotest logo files are available in my Fedora People space, including the Inkscape source.
yeah I like it, buts known I like comic styled things 😀 I would draw the gearwheel a little bit greater so that it comes more in foreground
I truly envy people who can draw!!!! Awesome work!
Thanks for sharing your process… just setup my tablet and was playing with the various graphics package, but wasn't feeling the love for Inkscape with the tablet yet – perhaps doing sketches first in MyPaint as you suggested (I was trying Krita and Gimp) might give me the creative freedom to just draw until I need to vectorize and polish it.
You bet I liked it 🙂 Thanks again for the awesome work, Máirín 🙂
Hi Mo
I like your helping hand 🙂
Nice drawing
AppelonD
Is the penguin symbolize the ubuntu? lol.
Your drawing is really nice.
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh….. what?