creative blog

Basilico is a volume manager application like gnome-vm or ivman which Daniele Favara, a.k.a. nomed, developed for his LiveCD Linux distribution dsslive. The purpose of this application is to handle new and existing drives/storage devices comfortably from the systray of any Freedesktop.org standard compliant desktop environment(designed originally for Xfce). It brings dialogs as similar as in GNOME or KDE but is coded in python and in my opinion less space consuming and nicer

Well, to the point, nomed asked me and Roxville to design an icon for this application, so here it is:

Style is based on the Tango project’s guidelines with scalable version available too. Done in 3 hours mainly thanks to the Roxvile’s music, check out, he is really inspirative musician!

note: icons are NOT public domain

My friend Tomáš Beran asked me to do a graphics for a website of his band orangerecordings. After two proposals which he rejected as too much commercial (they play Drum&Bass and he says that web has to be more “undergroundish”) he sent me some graphics to play with.

Well, I was without any inspiration for a few hours but then it came and I did this mockup:

What is good, that after a few changes he accepted this concept as final version. What is bad, that I do not know how will he transform this into a working website, it will be a little surprise

Those “commercial” versions and full sized final version can be seen at my gallery at deviantart.com.

note: concepts are NOT public domain!

Via gfxartist.com I’ve found out that there is a new version of graphics software for real painting on the computer, ArtRage 2.0. This new version exist in two variants whereas the commercial version($19.95) has some new tools which are not in the free version.

But this is not the main topic here; thanks to that article I’ve found amazing cartoonist Chad Essley (his site) and his blog showing so nice illustrations created on the tablet pc in Alias’s Sketchbook2. And among any other articles he made a comparison of the new Artrage 2 with Alias Sketchbook 2. And the result? Artrage 2 still needs some improvements but in this stage is still very useable for illustrations; So, download and illustrate and enjoy Chad’s blog&illustrations

Well, just at the end of the previous month, two czech students started a web server called HumanART.cz which focuses on similar things like servers DeviantART.com, CGTalk or GFXartist. But, in this case, in czech language. The web application and gallery categories still require some tweaking but it is growing. I’ve joined this project and wish them to build such a big community of czech artists like communities around above mentioned sites.

I’ve also started to work on a series of illustrations for a kids’ book I have in my mind for a time… First of them is called “Oscar the octopus and his friends” and besides my DA.com gallery you can see this and future ones in my HumanART.cz gallery too. Oh, and as you probably guess, I am not the one who writes the story for the book I had asked roxville for a help on this. While he is a singer and writes his own songs(check out on his website I think he can write a really nice story

The previous illustration has been made in the vector graphics editor Inkscape. Thanks to that I was able to create a colouring book’s version a day before yesterday. This version had been put under a heavy testing procedure, kids have it in their hands and god only knows what result will I recieve from these critics

I do plan to create a “Making of” of this illustration and the colouring book, so stay tuned (I will probably publish it bi-lingual, here in english and in czech on humanart.cz. Just need some time to write it

And at the end, only a short mention about new features in the Inkscape. Since .43 Inscape’s development had moved from cvs to svn versioning system, there are some UI improvements(swatches integrated int othe UI, new and pretty icons’ set by Plácido André Sousa), Outline mode under the View menu, snapping notifications and some more I did not remember

Hem, it could be everything for now Oh, I could nearly forget, I have not been aimed as a target for “Four things” thing yet And I still have some Google’s Mail’s invites, so if anyone wants one, comment here .

Eeeeeek, and of course, If anyone watched Rallye Monte Carlo 2006 in January, the design of prints of the car of Tibor Cserhalmi is my baby, completely done in Inkscape (so much for my ego)