Hi all,

I'm looking for someone (or a few people) to work with on becoming great with design & related areas. Here's my situation - maybe yours is similar?

I'm a nineteen year old living in the UK. I love design, especially design for the web (websites, icon design, logo design & generally digital art). I'm going to University in just over half a year and I want to start working on building a really wonderful and magnificent portfolio. I'm pretty technically minded and I'll be studying computing at Uni, but I intend to work as a freelance designer or some sort after my course. In the meantime I'd love to have people to work closely with and have the possibility of working with in the future. It'd be great to have a partner or small group of people to be able to work with on learning and becoming great - to be able to critique each other and help each other improve our artwork.

Anyone interested? Anyone excited?

I think this image gives a pretty good idea of my current skill level:

http://gleamingpixel.co.uk/images/aboutUs.jpg

And these guys give a pretty good idea of where I want my skill level to be:

http://www.pixelpressicons.com/
http://www.jasperhauser.nl/icon/
http://iconfactory.com/home
http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/

Although I'm very interested in much more than just logo design - those guys just got me particularly motivated!

I'm not looking for a huge commitment, just a few buddies to work closely with whenever we have the time. If you're interested please shoot me an email to dannyking at gmail.com or just reply here. Look forward to hearing from you!

Greets from Canada!

I'm not that great yet but would be interested in teaming up to see what we can do. Below are some examples of my work:









Let me know if you feel I could participate in anyway.

I'm no graphical whiz, but if you ever need tech support, will do my best

Thanks for your replies! I'd be very interested in teaming up! I just this second got an email from another member (I don't want to post names without permission) expressing interest so we may have a small group!

The question now is, what shall we team up on? Perhaps a set of artwork of some sort? More documentation for the Inkscape community? Maybe find examples of excellent work done in other image applications and try to reproduce it? I've recently started to really like icon design but I'm completely open to suggestions. Any ideas?

Good to hear from you all!

DannyKing wrote:The question now is, what shall we team up on?

That's what I first thought when I read your original post: Is this guy going anywhere with this?

My background and training is on the technical side but I can see the artist's gift. All my art work tends to be technical in nature. See http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/images/Circulatory.svg; for a complete story, see http://www.magma.ca/~shawnhcorey/200710/1193774664.html

I'm willing to help, but you must provide the focus. And just a hint, your time will be mostly coordinating the efforts of others; you'll may not have the time to contribute yourself.

Thanks shawnhcorey for your 'heads up', you raise a pretty good point! It'd be fantastic to have you helping out. I really liked your diagram of the circulatory system - functional and easy on the eyes! Thanks Simarilius, tech support is always good to have! Some great work there Darth_Gimp! I particularly like the attention to detail on the phone, especially the shading & lighting. Did you make the screencasts at heathenx.org? They are great! I've learnt a lot from them.

The reason why I started this thread was to make practicing and learning about Inkscape (and the GIMP & other open source image applications) a little more fun, since most things are more fun when done with a group of friends! I thought it might be nice to work on a group project which had the end result of benefiting the open source community in some way. Here are some ideas I had for such a project:

* Create a set of icons for a Linux distribution to rival the looks of an OS X icon theme, but also make it work with OS X & Windows.

* Create a set of really great images with a theme (and release them into the public domain?). (e.g. Animals, Flowers, Fruit, Electronics, etc, etc)

* Create a set of icons for use in websites. (example: http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/)

* Create a set of backgrounds showing off what can be done with open source art software

* Create an alternative set of icons for Inkscape, the GIMP, Scribus, Openoffice, etc (Just for fun! The icons we have now work very well.)

* Create the best looking set of tutorials / documentation on using Inkscape, GIMP, etc. (Although I must say the GIMP manual looks really good now!)

* Create a set of website templates / layouts that show off what can be done with open source art software

* Make the best looking calendar in existence! (this could be combined with the themed set of images idea)

What do you all think? Any that you like or dislike? Please post any more ideas and suggestions that you might have - weather linked to benefiting open source or not!

I'm willing to help, but you must provide the focus. And just a hint, your time will be mostly coordinating the efforts of others; you'll may not have the time to contribute yourself.

Yes, I suppose you're right there. I'm not particularly looking for anything formal with specific roles defined for anybody - personally, I feel the main focus should be on getting better at what we do, rather than the end result. But yeah, I'd be willing to try my hardest to provide focus and to coordinate. I'd also be perfectly willing for someone else to coordinate if anyone feels they are good at it or enjoy it.

So what do people think? Any ideas? Anyone have a better vision? If anyone else is interested in any of this, say hello in here!

Another idea: Create and illustrate a simple book (e.g. a simple children's book)

Anyone have any preference or other ideas?

To clarify, I have nothing to do with the screencasts... well other than being an avid fan. Those are HeathenX's and he's offering a great resource to Inkscape.

Thanks for the kind words on my work by the way.

As far as a project goes... well, how about some Icons and Logos? One thing I used to do to either develop or refine my skills in Photoshop (and now in Gimp) was to redesign logos. I did the same with websites. So perhaps we could start with a roll call.. a simple "who is in" deal then perhaps try our hand at some smaller challenges. Maybe select a known entity... InkscapeForum perhaps? Then design or re-design a logo and an icon for it.

Just a thought.

Ahh sorry for that confusion. Still, your work looks great!

Sorry for this late reply, I've been pretty busy on some client work.

Great! Let's select an entity then. Inkscape forum is one option, although I do think that it's current use of the Inkscape logo is a good idea. Perhaps we could redesign the smilies? I think microUgly wanted to change them at some point.

Any other ideas or other possibilities?

A roll call sounds like a good idea... so, who's in?

Another idea I just had:

We could perform a study of how different materials & elements (glass, frosted glass, plastic, metals, rubber, paper, wood, water, fire, etc, etc, etc) interact with each other and figure out how to render this photo-realistically in Inkscape (and GIMP?). After we succeed we could create a fantastic tutorial set explaining how to achieve this. I think this would a) be a fantastic resource for the Inkscape (and GIMP?) community, and b) dramatically improve our artwork.

Did that make sense?

What do you think? This would be hard but very rewarding. Currently I don't have the skill to do this, which is why I think it'd be so great to try it. After all, if it fails at least something is learnt.

Hello Danny

Perhaps once you get established with things, you and all of your supporters could provide a one stop shop for Inkscape templates, palettes, gradients, and maybe some python scripts. Looks like you'll have your hands full with things at first but maybe once everything settles down you could offer a place to stick all of those various things for others to download. I'm not sure what your intentions are. Whether you are just trying to start an artist guild or actually create a web site where folks might find your work. Just a thought.

Thanks HeathenX that's a great idea,

As for my intentions, they are simply to improve my skill set and, if possible, give something back to the Inkscape/GIMP community. I'm not looking to start a guild, just have a few friends to work with. Creating a website for people to do the same would be a great end result.

Thanks for your input!

I think we could combine both ideas. I also feel that it would be great that once we have a few of the materials mastered to use them to build the site.

As an admin over on Gimpdome.com I can also help with the gimp side of things, however we should concentrate on Inkscape here.

As for "wood" I feel that Ryan Lerch's approach has already been documented. Do you think we should explore others?

heathenx wrote:Hello Danny

Perhaps once you get established with things, you and all of your supporters could provide a one stop shop for Inkscape templates, palettes, gradients, and maybe some python scripts. Looks like you'll have your hands full with things at first but maybe once everything settles down you could offer a place to stick all of those various things for others to download.

I had thought you would have started to do this. If a separate site is created, would you mind a link to your screencasts? I've been an avid "fan" and I am always pointing people to your site when they ask me "how did you do that?" type questions. Although not on topic for this thread, but I have two questions for you ... 1) do you take requests for upcoming casts? 2) how would I submit such a thing to you, here on the forum or in e-mail or other?

Darth_Gimp wrote:I think we could combine both ideas. I also feel that it would be great that once we have a few of the materials mastered to use them to build the site.

I agree.

Darth_Gimp wrote:As an admin over on Gimpdome.com I can also help with the gimp side of things

Fantastic, I look forward to seeing Gimpdome launch!

Darth_Gimp wrote:As for "wood" I feel that Ryan Lerch's approach has already been documented. Do you think we should explore others?

Yeah good point, no need to reinvent the wheel - I had forgotten about Ryan's great wood tutorial. Also several other materials have been covered such as chrome, gold & diamond (After a quick scan of inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com). So yes, I think it'd be great to explore other materials if people feel this is a good project to work on?

Here's my vision: Create a comprehensive resource (website) containing step by step processes for creating realistic common materials in Inkscape that is easily updatable for when we find improvements to our methods. Let people easily access the gradients, patterns, scripts & SVG files used for each process. We would need to identify a list of materials to start working on, some off the top of my head are:

Clear Glass
Frosted Glass
Opaque plastic
Bronze
Silver
Copper
Iron
Terracotta (pots, etc)
Glazed Terracotta
Water
Cloth
Paper & card
Diamond, ruby, crystal, etc, etc
Pearl
Paint?
Stone
Skin types
Etc - I could probably go on forever. So I guess we'd need to identify the most commonly used materials and start with those?

There is a ton of reference material available so we shouldn't find it too hard, although it will be a challenge. I've spent about an hour looking for a list of materials and their common visual characteristics but I've not found anything online. The closest I came was finding blender (open source 3d modeling tool) textures - which were a good starting point actually.

In the short term we could use a wiki.

Does that line-up with what you were thinking, Darth_Gimp? Does this sound like fun to everyone?

@Darth_Gimp

I had thought you would have started to do this. If a separate site is created, would you mind a link to your screencasts? I've been an avid "fan" and I am always pointing people to your site when they ask me "how did you do that?" type questions. Although not on topic for this thread, but I have two questions for you ... 1) do you take requests for upcoming casts? 2) how would I submit such a thing to you, here on the forum or in e-mail or other?

Sure, you guys can link back to the "screencasters" if you wish. I link to this forum on our website as well as Ryan's and Nicu's sites. Spread the love.

Richard and I do take requests but it's not a formal thing. It usually starts out with an email from someone who is working on a project and they cannot figure something out. The last 3 or 4 that we have done have been requests. Most new users want to learn how to do something simple or get stuck somewhere. That makes for a perfect screencast. Just go to our "contact page" and send us an email if you would like to talk to us. We usually reply pretty quickly.

Anyway, back to Danny King. I am excited for those of you that are going to participate. It sounds like an interesting set of projects. Many of you are very talented artists and I cannot wait to see what you guys and gals come up with.