creative blog

Today, my new Wacom Graphire 4 Classic XL arrived at 10 a.m. This silver coloured, A5 sized drawing tablet took a while to get it working under Ubuntu Dapper Drake but with a few tutorials and help from Luciash, everything works without much problems.

First thing I’ve ever drawn with graphics tablet (Created in Inkscape)

I am back in the astronomy world After a year, an astronomy course takes place on Hvězdárna a planetárium Johana Palisy in Ostrava again. And this time I will finish it succesfully, I promise!

For the beginning, I’ve created two astronomy related wallpapers, one is a bit modified photography of Cassiopea constellation(with a nice story which I will write about after some time) and the second one is digitally drawn illustration of a comet and a star in the Milky way. I hope someone will enjoy these wallpapers as well as I enjoy astronomy lessons

Update: one new comet done to test how does tutorials from deviantart.com about creation of planet work in GIMP

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)