I’ve been searching the net as freak to find a good resource to create curly swirls and flowers, the new trend in the graphics sector and have found a load of sites explaining the process in Photoshop , but only few which explain this in Inkscape , THE free Open Source vector drawing software. I’ve been playing with the Inkscape curly features but didn’t really felt random enough to my opinion without working too much through the process…

So, I’ve started to draw these curley flowers by hand to digitize this towards perfection .. or atleast .. as perfect as possible, which has been giving a few nice results once they were taken through the Inkscape Path\\Trace Bitmap renderer! Art doesn’t really has limits on how you reach your goals, as long as it looks good and gives a good vibe….

Here are a few steps to create the entire process:

1. Draw a few flowers, curley lines as smooth as possible;
2. Color everything in black so the scanner takes the image easy;
3. Scan this and import into Inkscape (File\Import);
4. Use the Trace Bitmap renderer on the imported image (Path\Trace Bitmap);
5. Use the following settings for Trace Bitmap:
   • Brightness Cutoff treshold: 0,700 (Gets the renderer to catch finer lines for a better fill-in)
   • Edge Detection: 0,650
   • Remove Background: ON (for smoother integration with existing artworks/backgrounds)
   • Supress Speckless: OFF (in Options, only if you have been using small speckles or branches)
6. After pressing OK, wait a bit, select the original and remove it from your workspace;
7. Use gradients to fill-in the colors, layer up multiple flowers and swirls;
8. Export to an image;
9. Use The Gimp, PSP or PS with Halftone effect to get the rastered effects for the background;
10. Import the Inkscape image as layer and finished!

For fun, I’ve been adding inkblobs too, which is also possible through Inkscape although still too “barbie-plastic-perfectionistic” without working too much to get rid of the imperfections, so I’ve started doing this too with 2 different types of Ink on a few pieces of paper from about one meter high. The ink based on alcohol was brownish and pulled itself through the paper immediately as it touched ground zero.

The Chinese Ink gave a lot better interesting results. Since the drying process was taking hours I’ve been using overhead films to be able to scan the ink without painting the scanner black. After scanning and integrating in my image I’ve been testing the same chinese ink on transparant overhead projection foils and let them dry for a few hours. As soon as they were nearly dried up I’ve used a white glossy paper and scanned them in.

The results were marvelous and towards the effect I’ve been searching for! Scanned it in, used the above “Trace Bitmap” process,  used as layer, changed it’s transparancy for smoothness a bit and as you can see in the Flower Power orange wavy background and shaded background it’s great!

I’ve been playing with Inkscape blur at the end because it slows down the system heavy which gave the finishing touch the entire project.

Art doesn’t has any limits, in how you do it; as long as you achieve the idea you got in your head … The more creativity, the more you’ll see how things work or even don’t work together. I’ve learned alcohol will be nice to create coffee-spots; but to create real black blobs it’s too sucky; literally! If there are any interesting reactions or questions to release some of the material used in the process, I’ll be happy to share this through the article by adding some extra downloadable materials…

A few interesting links about computer generated inkscape curls can be found:

• mrtentacleguy at deviantart with a one page tutorial
  

  Early example of Flower Power

• inkscape whirls twirls and swirls swirl
• interesting “spin” on swirls through the Inkscape Spirals function

Enjoy and whatever you play with ink, don’t touch your face and nose with black ink like I did

Swirling out,

Freaking Wildchild

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