Episode 069
Episode 069 – Safety Card Illustration
by Richard Querin
In this episode I demonstrate a way of creating airline safety card style illustrations in Inkscape v0.46 using a bitmap image as a starting point.
I’ve been a fan of this sort of illustration for a while now. If you’re a Top Gear Magazine reader, you’ll find their ‘Survival Guide’ pieces use this type of illustration to great effect. I think it’s a neat way of creating a simple and attractive illustration. In many ways this is very much like Nicu’s post on HowTo Create a Hackergotchi. This is not so detailed, and covers action shots rather than faces I guess.
In true RQ tradition, I utilize the most basic of tools for this, the venerable Bezier tool along with Stroke and Fill and a couple quick path things. Very basic, but fun. Hope you enjoy it.
Tags: illustration, safetycard
August 28th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
[...] Episode 069 is now posted. In this one I create an Airline Safety Card style illustration from a photo. Phew.. that was a mouthful. [...]
August 29th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Very nice tutorial.
I wanna know who’s is singing in the intro ?
Thanks
August 29th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
nice tutorial
August 29th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Thanks eclipse. It’s Blink 182 – Anthem Part 2. And of course I scream “Fair Use!” from the rooftops! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use)
August 29th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Thanks suppar – glad you found it useful. Thanks for watching.
August 29th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Excellent demo/howto nicely combining objectives, techniques, and practical guidelines.
I wasn’t even aware of the terminology. Here are some google hits of possible interest:
airline safety card
http://novikov.livejournal.com/328396.html
or substituting “aircraft” per w’pedia’s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_safety_card
..jim
August 29th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
You can also find a lot of (slightly) funny ones over at airtoons.com (warning – nsfw in some cases).
Thanks James, glad you liked it.
August 29th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Sorry, should have posted the full link to make it clickable:
http://www.airtoons.com
August 29th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Thanks yet again Richard!
I always learn a lot in each screencast you do. Today it was layer locking and believe it or not the dropper tool. I have never used it, I don’t think you have used it in any of your previous screencasts.
Thanks for taking the time to post another tutorial at this time. Our Summers are so short in Canada, your supposed to be parked in a lawn chair.
August 30th, 2008 at 4:24 am
Screencasters cover a comic style: Airline Safety Cards…
If you remember my shot at making a comic out of a portrait you’ll know that I want some day to make an image like Roy Lichtenstein did.
Well, Richard Querin at screencasters .heathenx.org brought me a big step forward to that goal. I think we ha…
August 30th, 2008 at 5:24 am
Well another nice tutorial. Thank You
August 30th, 2008 at 8:42 am
@jim – You’re Welcome! – Thanks for watching.
@Meet the GIMP! – Rolf, thanks for the link. While it’s not the traditional comic style, it is an easy way to illustrate something include portraits (I did my avatar this way a while back). I really looked at whether the Trace function in inkscape could make this easier, but it really doesn’t IMO. You’re looking for simplicity and the Trace function doesn’t give me that. Suprisingly, I found that using the mouse gave me better results than using my Graphire3 tablet – no doubt this will be good news for all those people who don’t have one.
And if anyone wants to improve their bitmap editing skills definitely check out Rolf’s Meet the Gimp tutorials at http://meetthegimp.org The Screencasters highly recommend it!
August 31st, 2008 at 7:22 am
Very nice tutorial, indeed.
I found this http://www.hradkarlstejn.cz/data/titulka/1enleft_1.jpg?gcm_date=1169039099 It would be great if you could show me how to do.
Thank you very much.
August 31st, 2008 at 8:24 pm
@Kongritthi Ratanawanno
I’m not sure it would be very much different to what I’ve already shown in this screencast. I would simply use the Bezier tool and create a polygon for each area of differing colour. The challenge really is the complexity. It would be a lot more tedious than what I showed simply because there are more pieces to it. But if you approached it bit by bit I’m sure it wouldn’t be too tough. I can’t see the method being any different than what I already showed though.
September 5th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Thanks Richard, your screencasts are a godsend!.. (keep the..er.. goofs, it means you’re human like the rest of us
)
I keep playing with vectors on and off, & really enjoyed this tut.. being a Top Gear lover I knew what you were talking about, anyway not sure you want links (so feel free to nuke) here’s my effort (same theme as yours, bit of brain drain on the photo search, just wanted to get started
) – slightly morish detail but nowhere near perfect; I am newbie!) – like I say in the DA post, it was actually the starburst I enjoyed as I haven’t found a better way using Inkscape yet.. and it’s it I want to incorporate into something else
many thanks, and keep on castin’
September 5th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
@Suzy
I checked out your graphic and I think you did a superb job. One correction though…you might want to give Richard credit for episode 069 and not me (in your deviantart comments).
September 5th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
@Suzy – great job on the skater! I really like the way you did the jeans and the extra detail in it. That’s something I just didn’t have time to go into in the screencast. I chuckled a little bit when you said about the brain drain on the photo search. I settled on the pogo guy for the intro mostly because I had already spent a hour trying to find something ‘different’ than the skater on Google Image search, but found nothing that satisfied me.
ps. I know people get heathenx and I confused. Just remember that I’m the brains of the operation and he’s the looks.
September 6th, 2008 at 9:55 am
hehe, Richard I’ll try to remember that and thanks for both your comments.. just thought I’d let you know I appreciate your ‘casts!
(typo in DA comments now fixed, sorry Richard!)
September 13th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
That is a nice and quick way to achieve great looking illustrations from photos. Thanks for the show!
September 28th, 2008 at 7:07 am
Thanks so much for providing these screencasts. I’ve always been a little timid about creating digital art but deicded to try playing around with Inkscape after watching this episode and I got great results. Kudos.
October 13th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Thanks for this amazing tutorial!
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:33 pm
[...] – you might fine episode ep069 useful: http://screencasters.heathenx.org/episode-069/ also see [...]
January 31st, 2010 at 5:05 pm
can you please convert your files to avi or something else..
.ogv don’t work well even when i’m using puppy linux.
thanks for the tuts anyway.
February 1st, 2010 at 7:17 am
@cebu tours
We are not making AVI’s anymore but there is nothing preventing you from converting them. There are a bazillion ways to convert but here’s a simple mencoder script to convert OGV to XVID/MP3.
mencoder input.ogv -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -o output.aviFortunately, you are in luck. We have this particular episode in AVI already. Go to our video repo and download it from there. http://screencasters-repo.heathenx.org