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The most serene republicans

Northern Wood wrote:

Probably the most useful discovery I made was a tool within the program which can convert any simple silhouette image into something that can be easily manipulated. For instance, google "tree" and "silhouette" or "png" to pull up tons of flat, clip-art style images. Import it into Inkscape, press the button to "convert into bitmap," and it churns out the same exact image but now with perfectly clean sides and able to be recolored at will. The new image can also be utilized as a sort of "stamp," where it can be placed over another larger image in order to cut out that shape from it.

I can't emphasis enough what a game-changer this was, once I discovered it. For instance, it's how I created the jubilee flag.

The convert into bitmap thing is absolutely the life of me. I'm way too lazy to draw most things from scratch lol. Illustrator has pretty much the same tool too, I don't remember what it's called though.

I also recommend downloading actual SVGs online, because there are soooo many of them available for free and since they were already made as vectors, you can basically separate the parts you need and use them without the slight distortion that convert to bitmap has. My two main sources are Wikimedia Commons (to which I've started giving back a bit recently) and OpenClipart. You know that CoA I used as a flag until a few hours ago? The ring of grain is from the CoA of china, just recolored and in solid colors rather than a gradient. Here are them both for comparasion:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ab/National_Emblem_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China_%282%29.svg/1024px-National_Emblem_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China_%282%29.svg.png
https://i.imgur.com/1KprksB.png

Wikimedia Commons actually has a whole section of svg heraldry elements I use for flags and emblems all the time.

Mount Seymour wrote:I still have to do a lot of tinkering to get many things to work

You know how the first thing I said when I sent you a vector file was "the strokes might be screwed and I don't know why"? At this point I'm entirely convinced everyone who does any sort of design has to deal with this sort of thing and just... Improvise a bit. Sometimes I'm doing something on inkscape and suddently everything becomes mildy transparent.

PS: I also found that drawing something on a very low resolution on mspaint and then converting it into bitmap on paint makes it look like my artstyle sucks a lot less than it really does. You're welcome

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