About a year ago I was really tired of working by myself and started to look for people to work with. After talking to several companies I decided to work with the amazingly talented people at Zoink and after working for them as a freelancer for a few months I accepted an offer of employment.

Zoink is a small studio that makes games, so I’m back in my old business . I work there mainly as an art director, but since we are such a small team everone takes on several roles, which means that I’m also very involved in game design.

This is the reason for me not showing this blog any love for more than a year. Sorry about that. Work has been taking a lot of my time.

Unfortunatly I haven’t had time to follow what’s going on in the FOSS comunity either. However, I still use Inkscape and Blender quite regularly at the office. Unfortunatly Mypaint doesn’t work with the 24 inch cintiq that I use at the office. I really hope they’ll fix that in the next version (please!).

I will try to write a bit more (Guess most people have forgotten me by now though:) ). At least I will try to write about the projects that I’m involved in at work. Right after this I will post about one of our new games…

Thank you!

Just a bunch of random images. Added them to the gallery.

Inkscape doesn’t handle dithering of gradients very well. It produces quite strong banding artifacts, which is a shame, because the gradient tool in Inkscape is a lot of fun to work with. The fact that you can do gradients from opaque to transparent is something that you can’t even do in Adobe Illustrator (or at least you couldn’t a few versions ago. Don’t know how it is in more recent versions though).

So, to break the banding I took the image I made in Inkscape and imported it into GIMP. Then I tried different noise filters on it. Mainly using the G’MIC Plugin. Trying to address this as I would if it was a video that had bad banding errors.

However, I fell in love with how the noise filters softened the overall image. Made me tweak it a bit more (and overdo it! All my vector work will look like this for a while now. Until I get sick of it :). ). Softening the colors. Getting rid of the clinical coldness I often feel is present in vector graphics. The noise makes it a bit more “papery” (is that a word?) Haven’t done any vector work in a while so I had great fun making it. Inkscape really is a fantastic piece of software and absolutely lovely to work with. I made everything in grayscale in Inkscape and then added the color in GIMP. A test with different colors below.

Images added to the gallery.

Detail: