In another attempt to educate myself, today I have been playing around with vector graphics software. I have never used any program like this before, my skills included Paint and that was about it. I've kind of shied away from anything else previously, mostly because any graphics software always looks so complicated and I've not had any major need or desire to learn to use it.
I am using Inkscape; it's an open source program that, from what I've read, holds its own against professional software such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. Best of all, it's free!
I can never learn a skill arbitrarily - there has to be an end result in sight for me. So I tried to find a tutorial to draw something, that wasn't too difficult for my total-noob credentials. I followed this tutorial for a Japanese kokeshi doll, as shown below. It's quite long (took me a few hours, though that did include some major dawdling such as painting my nails), but really easy to understand and I think I've grasped a few of the basics now.
Unfortunately, I haven't yet figured out a way to upload the images to the blog in their original .svg state, so this has been converted to a .png with the disappointing but unsurprising result of it looking all pixelly. :(
Despite my having 'cheated' by following a tutorial, I'm chuffed that I've been able to make this little doll without too much difficulty. For anybody that's thinking of having a go with software like this, bite the bullet - it's a lot less scary than it looks!
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