I've lost count of whatever day this is supposed to be in my challenge, so I'll just use question marks. LOL. I'm afraid I underestimated how much treatment I would need, because I'm scheduled for this first round to last until June 1st (way past Mother's Day). After June 1st, I'm tentatively scheduled for 2 weeks of recuperation, then 3 weeks of high-dose radiation followed by 2 weeks of an additional boost of low-dose radiation. But before I start the second round of treatments in mid-June, I'm looking into surgery so that maybe I won't need all of that extra radiation. In the meantime, I have one more chemo treatment this coming Wednesday. I have a wonderful chemo nurse, Lynda W, who is a true angel, so I made a Nurses Day card with an illustration that represents her. Here it is.
Happy Nurses Day to a Loving, Caring Nurse - Lynda Card by ilovecuttables
Shop for a greeting card on zazzle.com
I'll be happy when the chemo is done, but I'll sure miss Lynda.
I'm going to need to put this daily challenge on hiatus for a few weeks. I need chemo and radiation treatments for my cancer (although it is a very treatable form of cancer). The treatments will take a lot of my time and I'll also be extremely exhausted for the next few weeks. I know because I had cancer 14+ years ago. I hope to be back by Mother's Day (May 13th), so in honor of that day, I created this design for a Mother's Day card. Bye for now, but I hope to be back soon. :)
I *Heart* Florida!
This one took me four days to complete. It is for a gift for one of my nieces. :) I needed to track down some photos to use in the text of the words and the heart. The bird in the "O" came from Tom Betty (Thank you Tom, and Sri Devi for providing it!). The rest of the photos came from Morguefile.com (thanks Czbrat, SJ Franks, Hummingbird, Cesstrelle, Heirbornstud, Sharon (aka Manuere), Jjulian812, Guilane Nachez!). The hard part, of course, was putting it all together. I created the words and manipulated the fonts so they'd be big enough to show some of the pictures. Then I spent a good deal of time arranging them till I thought they looked nice. I then clipped each letter to an appropriate photo. Alas, that caused the file size to be huge and it kept crashing my computer. Then I added red and black outlines to all of the letters and the heart.
Riding Around in a Truck.
I have been diagnosed with cancer and won't be able to spend near as much time with my daily challenge as a result. I will still work on art every day, but I'll only post an item after I've completed it, no matter how many days it takes me. Thanks for your understanding.
For this image, I used my stick figures from a previous challenge and added a truck, a road, a speech bubble, etc. I couldn't come up with anything funny for Chuck to be saying, though.
Crazy Face Project.
No time for anything substantial because my kids were still here today and I'm always going to choose spending time with them over working on my daily challenge.
For this, I just made a circle, gave it a stroke width of 250, made the stroke 30% grey, gave it a blur, and then duplicated that. I then duplicated that circle twice and I gave the stroke for the one on top a circle pattern and then used the black outline filter on that. Then for the other I changed the stroke to 80 and turned it blue with a 22% blur. I added a face, and that's about it.
Rainbow Abstract. My daughter's here and my son will be coming home soon, so I don't have much time for my challenge. I made a marker and then used it in a random shape. Then I added a warped rainbow filter for color and texture. :)
I felt like making some abstract art with markers again. :) I just created a rainbow colored shape, and gave it marker properties, and made a design with lots of nodes. The rainbow colored shaped marker was adhered to every node. Fun stuff. :)
Today I created some peacock feather shapes in pretty colors, then I used the Inkscape Watercolor filter and then the Fluorescent Colors filter. :) It's a gorgeous day out today, so I want to hurry up and get out there and enjoy it!
A funny new cartoon for a t-shirt! :) I just drew the stick figures and added text. Easy peasy! Here's the finished product in my Zazzle store.
More experimenting with filters. :)
This is a very bright Happy Birthday image. I started with a swirly gradient blend on the background, then used Scatter Cubes and a black outline. For the text I used the same swirly gradient blend for the text filter, but this time I used the Matte Jelly fill and Specular Lights. I then gave it a black outline and used Florescence Color on the whole thing. :)
Experimenting.
This is the result of me playing with some filters. :) I made a swirly design and duplicated it a few times, and I thought 'huh, that reminds me of a cabbage flower.' So I added a tissue-like wrap and bow. The tissue wrap was made with filters, too. I think the filters I used were Cracked Lava, Crumpled Plastic, and Liquid. There may have been another, but I don't recall.
Brady and Casey!
A few days ago I made word art pieces for my nieces, Callie and Abby. So today I made word art pieces for my nephews, Brady and Casey. :) I used a woven look background from an earlier project, but using some filters in Inkscape, I managed to color the green and blue. Adding the text was not too difficult, and I used a second layer to duplicate the text and give it a blur. :)
Happy Birthday Card!
Here's another project with the flowers from Day 196. :) I LOVED playing with the Inkscape filters for this one! What I finally ended up using to get this pearl-like look was the "Warm Inside" filter (under Morphology) and the "Matte Jelly" under ABC's. I love how the flowers and hearts have a glossy look, and I think the whole piece is quite pretty against the black background. I'm very satisfied with how it turned out. :)
Today's challenge is a piece of weathered notebook paper with a poem on it. :) I saw a cool image here that inspired me to create this.
I started with a rectangle and gave it several light, pastel shades. Then I added aligned and evenly spaced blue lines, a vertical red line, and three dots to give it a 'notebook paper' look. I then added my little little poem so the paper wouldn't be blank. :)
*Mom*
I wasn't finished with the flowers from my Day 196 challenge. ;) So I worked on enhancing the components from that image for today's "Mom" card project. I created more swirls, vines, flowers, leaves, hearts, and a different font for the text, and rearranged them to look nice. I also put the entire bunch of flowers on top of a gradient background. :)
Happy Pi Day! (March 14th)
I had a lot of work to do today, and one thing I had to do was to create some Pi Day cards. So that's my challenge for the day, too.
I used the swirl frame that I created for Abby's design, but I changed it some and added some Pi symbols and appropriate text, and that's about it. :)
Happy Mother's Day Card!
I decided to make one more project using that circle of swirls that I used in yesterday's and Saturday's projects.
In this one, I used a different color of the the circle swirl, but I did the same as with Abby's name and I filled it with the swirls and then outlined everything, and set it on a dark blue background.
For today's project, I made another fancy name image. This time for another one of my nieces, Abby. :) I used the same circle of swirls, but I changed the colors of it. Then, instead of duplicating the circle swirl for the pattern, I just used Inkscape's 'clip' feature to fill the text with the swirls from within the circle, itself. Then I used some of the swirls and colored them, and surrounded and put them around the name in a decorative way.
I made a floral swirl design for today's challenge, and then I turned it into a pattern for a text fill. First is my original design, and then my niece's name with the pattern fill. :) I'm trying to get more accustomed to using text in my designs. :) For this one, I created a flower for the center and then a few swirl patterns. I duplicated the swirl patterns around the flower until I thought it looked pretty. Then I gave it a gradient background, duplicated it in a sort of pattern, and then I used the "clip" feature in Inkscape to fill the text with the pattern.
Moonarized Cherry Blossoms. Today's a family member's birthday and we were out painting the town red (ha ha). Not really, but we WERE out for a few hours and I didn't have much time to work on my project so I just found a picture of our cherry blossoms from last spring and then I used a moonarize and a quadritone fantasy filter on it. :) It's different...but I liked how it turned out. :)
One last face for the 29 Faces Challenge - a sugar skull image.
Basically, I drew the shape of a skull and the eye sockets and nose holes. Then I made the teeth/mouth. After that I added the flowers and some color to the skull "face" of the image. I used some filters on the "face" to give it a cracked/textured look. That's it.
Happy Leap Day!!! And happy leaping, if you're into that kind of stuff. ;) My last project for the 29 Faces is a frog daydreaming about leaping. :) He seems happy. There were plenty of tutorials on the internet, but this is the one I used for the middle frog inside the thought-bubble: Frog Tutorial. Hope everyone has a wonderful leap day!! :)
Sunshine Smile and Shades. :) The only thing new that I created for today's challenge are the sunglasses (including the pink lenses). Lol. Sorry, I just ran out of time today and needed to scrape a face together with parts from previous challenges. Some days my artwork will be better (and more created - from scratch) than other days, but today isn't one of those days. Lol.
Pretty purple posy. I used a marker to create the purple posy. As for the face, I remade the lips and eyebrows from yesterday's project, but the rest was from scratch. As for the eyelashes, I used a spiro path with a triangle brush (to give the lashes nice sharp tips) and made several lashes, then duplicated them for the rest.
Today's "Kiss Me I'm Irish" face was inspired by in invitation from Zazzle to enter a Pinterest contest. I used some pieces from previous projects, but there's a lot that's brand new about it, too. :) The flourish-hair is new, and it was (I think) a clever way to avoid some of the issues I've been having lately trying to create hair. Another thing that's brand new with this project are the lips. Fun and...very green. :)
Today's 'Dragon Kite' was so much more enjoyable to create than yesterday's 'Woman in Shock' because I didn't have to deal with hair! :)
I just drew the dragon face parts, added some abstract swirls, made some fire & smoke and then put it all on a colorful kite background.
And no proper kite would be complete without a tail, right? So I added gradient color there, too. :)
OMG, this was a horrifying experience! This began as a fun Friday face of a cartoon woman looking shocked, but my laptop kept crashing and it ended up just being a miserable project to work on, instead. :( Nothing much to say about it, I drew all the body parts separately, and I guess the problems were with the curls. I used a technique that I found a tutorial for,but since it only served to keep crashing my computer, I'm not going to include it here at this time. Sorry. I don't want anyone to go through what I went through today as a result of a link that I provided.
Today's project is a compilation of several previous projects. I've been working on improving my skills creating politicians and well-known people's faces so that I could use them in cartoons and other images to sell through Zazzle. So after last night's Republican debate, I realized I had the makings of something funny (at least I think it's funny - lol). Since these were all faces I made previously (and explained what I did, at the time), I won't do any more explaining today.
Today's cartoon is Rick Santorum. I'm working on a larger cartoon with several of the faces I've created during the 29 Faces challenge that I'm participating in. Anyhow, this one, like yesterday's was just a matter of looking at some pix of Santorum on the internet and drawing Rick the best I could. I didn't give him a duplicate of Mitt's suit because Rick wears sweater vests. :)
Today's challenge is Newt Gingrich. I'm planning to do a cartoon with him and Mitt and Rick Santorum for Zazzle soon, so I needed to get to work on them (well I already made a Mitt cartoon a couple weeks ago). Anyhow, all I just look at pictures of Newt that I found surfing the net, and drew him the best I could. I also reused Mitt's suit, changed the color and expanded it to fit Newt. Lol.
Two more critters in love. :) Still on an animal face fetish, I created two frisky, flirtatious and friendly fishies for today. :) I used the same basic outline of the fish I created on day 187, but I removed the rainbow filter and replaced it with an oil slick filter for the fish on the left. For the fish on the right, I used the sub-path effect on the fins and tail. I gave them each their own bowl and some hearts that began as bubbles which turned into a big red heart. :)
Two cute little owls sittin' in a tree... soon they'll be k-i-s-s-i-n-g! ;) I guess I'm partial to animal faces this week. I used a circle I made from markers on Day 169 of my daily challenge for the front designs on these lovebirds. The tree (with some alterations) was from Day 48. Other than that, I made the owls from scratch. :) Perhaps I shouldn't have made the eyelashes so dark, however, in my art program they show up as the brown that they are.
Easter Bunny with floppy ears and an Easter egg. I just drew this bunny in Inkscape and used one filter...that was a 'torn edge' on the bunny's tail to give it a fuzzy look. The egg was from an earlier project.
Today's project was created using an amazing online tool called Scribbler by Mario Klingemann. It's a fabulous and fun program, so check it out if you have a few minutes. I'll admit that since this was my very first project with it, I will need to learn what settings will look best with which parts of my artwork. In the case of this piece, the eyes looked terrible when I originally created them in Scribbler, so I changed them in Inkscape to look less terrifying. :)
A line-art bird is today's challenge. I created the line-art work in Inkscape using a fun feature called stitching sub-paths. I used the the technique for my Mardi Gras girl's beaded skirt on day 207. Here's the link again to to learn how to use Inkscape's stitching sub-paths effect.
Today's challenge is a clown's face. There really wasn't anything about it that I haven't done before, because it is composed of bits and pieces from past challenge projects. I hope I'll be able to do something from scratch tomorrow, but don't judge me if I can't. Lol!
Happy Valentine's Day! Since I created portraits of Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi earlier in this challenge, I thought it would be appropriate to combine their faces in a heart to celebrate Valentine's Day. :) There are people out there who (sadly) want to condemn others for being in same-sex loving relationships. They are wrong and they are mean to try to interfere with true love! Gay marriage will be legalized in all fifty states in the not-too-distant future, as it should be. In the meantime, this is my tribute to true love in its most genuine form. Happy Valentine's Day to everyone, and especially to Ellen and Portia. :)
Kokeshi Doll. I needed today's challenge to be an easy face because my back is bothering me a lot again and I can't sit at the computer long. So I made a Kokeshi Doll. She was easy enough to make with shapes in Inkscape. As for the flowers on her dress and in her hair, those are the flowers that I created on Day 196 of my challenge, and I just duplicated, rotated, and resized them to suit her kimono. :)
My Mardi Gras Girl took quite awhile to create today, but mostly because I haven't learned how to make my art with compactness, so the file was crashing my laptop every so often. Anyhow, I'll just touch on some of the more unusual things that I did to create her and her costume. I started with the fractal leaf from Day 194 of my challenge and changed the gradient color a bit and then duplicated it over and over to use for her feathers. The bodice of her costume was created using a shape that I applied a stitched sub-path effect in Inkscape to. Then I duplicated/flipped/joined it and then added a materials filter called Iridescent Beeswax (what an odd name, but I love how it turned out). I liked the Iridescent Beeswax so much that I used the same filter on her shoes, hairpieces, jewelry, and the tips of her mask. Her make-up is just some blurred shapes which I tried to match colors to her costume. Finally, the beaded skirt was created using a stitched sub-path again. Then I gave the stroke a dash pattern (to look like beads), then I turned the dashed stroke blue & then duplicated it and turned the stroke of the second one to a pinkish color. Here's a link that explains the cool sub-path stitching.
Not much time to create a face today, so I went with a cartoon kitty. :) We have a brown and white striped kitty (Louie) who is more white than brown. He was sort of my model for this project. :) Not much to it, I just created some shapes and put them together. About the most unusual components were the whiskers. I used the pencil tool with a triangle shape, and then I edited the path to get the whiskers to become really thin outside of the face.
I found out today that I really suck at creating hair. I thought when I started this project that I'd be able to do it, but I'm not happy with how it turned out. Anyhow, first I had to spend some time searching the internet for suggestions on creating hair (and particularly curly hair). Not much out there for Inkscape. But between the bits and pieces that I could find, this is what I ended up with. I just made shapes that looked like long curly thick strands (because I sure didn't want to go through what I had to with my frizzy-haired girl again), then I added some smaller shapes for the highlights. After that I blurred it all so it would somewhat match the face. It's supposed to be Portia de Rossi, since I created a portrait of her wife, Ellen, the other day.
Today's face has been a real challenge to work on, but I really feel like my facial skills are improving. Alas, I didn't have time to finish it, so the rest of it (with hair, I hope) will be tomorrow's challenge (or the next day). In the meantime, what I did to create this was to put everything on layers (makes it so much easier to work with), and then I just outlined shapes that I wanted and then I used a lot of blurring (not many gradients) and a variety of opacity levels.
I created an Ellen DeGeneres face for my challenge yesterday and then today she addressed her critics from a group called One Million Moms who don't want her to be the spokesperson for JCPenney. My mouse face today is giving the 'raspberry' to the narrow-minded haters (from One Million Moms) who feel that way.
My challenge today is a digital illustration of Ellen DeGeneres. I watched her program yesterday because Jim Parsons (of The Big Bang Theory) was one of her guests and while I was watching, I thought Ellen-with her gorgeous eyes and smile, and her adorable hair cut--would make an ideal model for my 29 Faces challenge. I actually started working on this one yesterday and spent a few more hours on it today. I drew her features, and then used a tremendous amount of blurring (because that was the best way I knew to hide my artistic flaws). I also utilized layers again (those sure do come in handy). I enjoyed doing this, but am planning to make easier faces over the next few days.
Going Green-ish. I started off making this feminine face, but the colors that were calling me were green and blue. Not really sure why, but I wasn't going to fight it. :) I just used some shapes (admittedly some that had been created for previous projects) and put them together and colored them (giving some of them gradients). I'm afraid I didn't have a lot of time to work on it today.
Since I did a cartoon of Mitt Romney the day before yesterday, I decided to make a caricature of President Obama (although it is meant to be a complimentary caricature); however, I might make some changes to it for a future daily project. Today's challenge allowed me to make some major strides with learning layers in Inkscape. I've been working with them a little over the past few months, but this project utilized layers from start to finish. :) I used some photographs from the internet as my models, and as with the Mitt project I used my computer mouse to create shapes and gradients. But something new that I tried with the President is this: when I created his mouth it wasn't smiling enough for the picture, and I wanted it to. So I learned about using the "bend" effect on a path, and was easily able to make him smile; and THAT made ME smile! :)
Here's my face of the day. :) It took me awhile, and it made me realize how happy I am that I decided to combine both of these challenges, because I don't think I'd have time to do two separate challenges for the rest of February. :/ What I did with today's face is to use a few of the elements from my original girl from Day 180, but I changed her considerably. I changed her eyes and nose a little, I changed her coloring quite a bit, her hair is totally new, I changed her body positioning and clothes some, and I added a nifty blurred background.
I've been meaning to create a cartoon of Mitt Romney (because I have some fun ideas for Zazzle products to make with it), so I decided to do it today for my second face in the 29Faces challenge. Basically, I created shapes in Inkscape (I don't have a good tablet, so I did it all with the mouse) and put them all together to form his basic facial features. I used some pictures that I found on the internet to use as my models (easy to find since they are everywhere). Then I added a suit and tie and a gradient background. I'm pretty happy with it. :)
I'm joining a 29 day challenge (actually 28 days for me since I'm a day late - lol) to create a face a day (for February). Since I missed the first day, I made my first face looking at a reflection in a mirror (clever way to get two for one, eh?). And since I'm already doing a daily challenge with my art, I will probably combine the two challenges for most of the month of February, and post the faces here. :) This face is just a flower with some light gradient petals duplicated over and over and flipped/rotated, and then a face (of simple shapes) added. And then, of course, I created a mirror and duplicated the face for that.
I started thinking about Mother's Day cards today, so I made one for my challenge. :) I just created some swirls, flowers, leaves, hearts, and text, and put them altogether. :)
I decided to make another fractal design today using the link I gave you yesterday. I just plugged in the equations, made a few minor adjustments, duplicated the result and then gave both items a rainbow gradient. That's it. :)
I found a great new tutorial today that describes how to make fractals in Inkscape using the L-System rendering feature. :) So for today's challenge, I created my very first one, and I added gradients to give it extra prettiness.
New banner? Maybe. I'll have to see how it looks and get some input from my daughter. :)
Either way, it's my challenge today. I used some of the "paper people" that I made back on Day 80, only instead of putting them in a circle, I put them on a wavy line. Then I created another line in the same shape, and put the text on that path. :) Easy enough.
This week has been messed up and yesterday my internet went down and I couldn't upload my challenge. So I made an image that I thought was uniquely fitting. It's just a funny word (klaüsterfökken) and I used a rainbow filter and the dynamic offset on it. :) If you want to see a very funny video by Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report that puts klaüsterfökken into perspective, then follow this link. Probably not suitable for kids.
Today's challenge is an extension of the "Heroes" that I made on Day 189. I added some additional text and made some swirls and hearts; and now I will use it for some greeting cards. I also added a rainbow filter to my logo at the bottom.
This is my first entry in the second part of my challenge. I decided to start this second part because the first part of the challenge was taking so long to load. My artwork today is a sort of Raggedy-Ann-looking image, except the hair is more brown and more frizzy. :) I wanted to make another frizzy-haired character mostly to see if I could make the file size (of the hair) smaller and more compact. It isn't much smaller, though. Anyhow, I just made some squiggles and duplicated them over and over, and made some of them blurry. Then I added a face that I thought would be fitting...the easy shapes of Raggedy Ann. :)
Days 1 through 189 can be found here.
