These are the people in my internet*: Enrico Casarosa

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Related to some thinking I’ve been doing about the ways in which I have used, and do use, the internet, and also related to the fact that the 2012 Oscar ceremony took place last night…

I don’t care much about the Oscars (hey, cynicism and also a complete lack of opportunities to watch movies in the past year), but I did happen to have an arbitrary bias toward the Pixar short La Luna (which I haven’t seen) in the best animated short film category.  Not due to any sort of clairvoyant knowledge about the relative strengths of the competitors in that category, but just because it was directed by one Enrico Casarosa.

In the early-to-mid ’00s, Casarosa was an active member of the Flight forums, a very active (but currently eerily quiet, following publication of the eighth and final volume of Flight anthologies) community of comics creators (with dabblers like me at the periphery). He coordinated the First World Wide SketchCrawl drawing marathon in November 2004. People in different countries spent the day out drawing, alone or in groups, and shared results on the SketchCrawl forum. I joined in, in my solitary way, heading into Cambridge with sketchpad, pencils, water brush, and pocket watercolour set in my MEC carry-all bag.

Here’s me in November 2004, about to come down with the flu:

(I notice those are the shoes I wore today.)

I sketched for a few hours. A lot of my watercolours were blotted off the sketches by rain-soaked opposite pages in the sketchbook.

I did that one inside Starbucks. So the paint stayed on.

That night I uploaded my work to share and perused what others had created. Then, having spent the day standing around in the cold and wet, I succumbed to a miserable flu and have never felt up to joining a SketchCrawl event again. However, I have always admired Casarosa’s leadership in setting up a framework and inspiring people to take part. The 34th World Wide SketchCrawl took place in January this year.

Fast-forward to the past year. Casarosa blogged a day-in-the-life series of posts on the process of making La Luna, and he gave a peek at the experience of being nominated for an Oscar on Twitter (@sketchcrawl). His tweets share some of the magic of his work (including “bloopers,” or incorrectly-rendered images from the computer-animated film), the wonder of being a dad, and an all-around happy attitude that I resonate to. It doesn’t hurt that he makes a point of enjoying his commute on a nice Bianchi bicycle, complete with old-school toe clips.

(I think I coloured this one on the computer. There was a ceremony for turning on the Christmas lights in Cambridge that evening.)

As it turns out, La Luna didn’t win the Oscar, but it’s one short film I’ll make a point of seeing.

*Yes, this is a reference to this.

Making a sketch into vector art using Inkscape

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I noticed a flurry of excitement on Twitter over a new product from Wacom called the Inkling, a combination of a pressure-sensitive ballpoint pen and a doodad that clips onto the top of your sketchbook and records the position of the pen by detecting inaudible sound pulses emitted by the pen. The position and pressure data are recorded and the sketch reconstructed in software.

I archive doodles using my camera; there’s a higher chance I’ll see them again if they’re on the computer, especially if I tag them as sketches in Digikam. The Inkling might streamline this process and enhance it with easy conversion into vector graphics and the ability to switch layers (so a rough sketch can be separated from refinements drawn over it). Having to find the doohickey and clip it onto a sketchpad before starting any sketch might be enough hassle that I’d reach for a more gratifying-to-use pencil, pen, or brush, though, and then I’d have to take my photo anyway.

Using a standard ballpoint refill may make sense, all things considered, but it’s not the most pressure-sensitive of drawing instruments. The physical pen sketch on the page can’t reflect anything interesting the software might do with the pressure data, like varying linewidth or opacity, as suggested by images here and here respectively. I imagine that with practice one could visualize the intended effect, but to my mind it’s quite a compromise. It will be interesting to see when hands-on reviews start cropping up.

So, that all said, I’m not the intended audience for the Inkling, but I had been following the countdown to the unveiling of a new product from Wacom, hoping for a pressure-sensitive stylus for capacitive touchscreen devices (like my Asus Transformer or an iPad). When I saw that the new product is for digitizing drawings made on paper, I was inspired to test how easy it is to vectorize a photo of a drawing by getting the free vector graphics program Inkscape to trace it. Now, I’m a complete Illustrator ignorant, and I haven’t spent a lot of time with Inkscape either, so the nuances of working with vector graphics escape me completely. The result of this process may be non-ideal for most people’s applications. I ran through it just to see what would happen.

Here’s a doodle I’d made during a landmark first (and probably only, ever, with autumn just about upon us and G approaching three years of age) coincidence of warm, sunny weather and both children sleeping. I should really have made a pen or brush sketch for this, I suppose.

Import into Inkscape and go to Path->Trace Bitmap… I chose a single scan with brightness threshold 0.880.

A different trace, this time using several levels of grey (I chose 4), followed by a Path->Simplify operation:

These examples were carried out without optimizing the settings, but I was impressed. My low-contrast doodle was made into an SVG file, with vectory shapes with nodes you can tweak, and no limit on their resolution. They look like something you could make something out of. Incidentally, the inkscape tutorials weblog is a good general Inkscape resource, with links to some really neat tutorials.