F10 Gears: Colouring the Gears - Golden Gears

Last week I talked about drawing gears with Inkscape (for a Fedora 10 theme proposal, but not only), now it's the time for a promised follow-up: let' put some color on the gears.

I want to make the gears golden (or bronze, there is not much difference in the process) to express the value and at the same time match the intended steampunk style. The start is exactly where I left the image, black outlines on a transparent background:

The first step is to define the color, and metallic is not a color, the metallic look of a surface is given by light reflection, so we will use a multistop gradient (a gradient with more than two colors). For gold it should contain a succession of lighter and darker shades of yellow, maybe also a bit of orange, for bronze also yellows with a shade of green (copper oxidation is green), for steel it should contains greys, the chrome is also greys but more reflective (more contrast, from almost black to almost white), silver is less reflective grey and so on.
Here is my gold:


Then take one wheel and apply the gradient to it:


For a 3D look add a drop shadow (duplicate, make it black, move a few pixels down and right, move it under the wheel, add a bit of blur and maybe decrease the opacity):


The gear does not say on air, we'll put on a background, and I used the same golden gradient for the sake of simplicity, you can use a different one, maybe darker:


Add some more gears (all your golden gears). Note the usefulness of the drop shadow, without it it would be hard to set apart the gear from the background, now they are distinct objects:


To make the image more vivid (and because so looks the pocket watch I'm using as a reference, I add some steel gears. Start this by defining the gradient (multistop, greys, with a shade of blue):


And apply the gradient to some wheels:


Here is one trick to get some of the wheels richer, not that plain and boring: add a groove - two smaller circles, aligned to the center of the gear, filled with the same grey gradient, the larger in an opposite direction, the smaller in the same direction as the rest of the wheel:


Put the steel gears in the device (just take care to not couple steel gears with gold gears: steel with steel and gold with gold):


Now for some axles: small circles, made from gold, steel, ruby or sapphire (if you remember my attempt to cheat and put more blue). Do not forget the drop shadow and consider a white highlight:


Place the axles in the center of the gears and we are set:


But I often have a tendency to go overboard and will do now the same: add some screws holding the device. They are easy to do: create a steel circle, substract a rectangle to create the groove, add a darker steel rectangle, the bottom of the groove, rotate the screw to a random angle (we don't want all the screws to have parallel grooves, that would be repeating and boring), fix the gradient and add a drop shadow. Maybe a hole: a larger circle colored with the same gradient as the background but with an opposed orientation. (I increased the zoom level in this step for a clearer illustration)


Distribute the screws evenly (or randomly it you feel like too) and it's done:


Now wait for another follow-up, probably next week, when I will try to color is an old drawing on old paper or blueprint style.

Was she there, or wasn't she? Removing objects from photos with GIMP and Resynthesizer

Resynthesizer is a very cool GIMP plugin I have been playing with for a few days. It can be used for some "magic" effects: create seamless backgrounds, transfer textures from one image to another and remove objects from images.

The plugin is not installed by default, but is available on the website, with binaries for various OSes. In Fedora we have it already packaged, only a yum away: yum install gimp-resynthesizer.

I like its "remove objects" feature, which of course is far from perfect and works best on selected images, but is the kind of effect you see on movies: a few clicks and poof! instant coolness (in the same league with SIOX).

So open your photo with GIMP and draw a free selection (with the Lasso tool) around it:

Then apply the plugin: Script-Fu -> Enhance -> Smart remove selection...


If the case change the radius (just try some values) and leave it to work for a few seconds:


And admire the "magic":


Then you have only one thing left to do, wonder: Was she there, or wasn't she?:


If you want to get close to perfection, use the clone tool or the healing tool and remove the remaining artefacts, just don't try to use the photo as an evidence in a court of law or pass it as true photojournalism.

In reply to "Fedora + Creative Arts"

Jon talk about encouraging "creative" people to use Fedora and his ideas about achieving this.

Well, the answer is really simple: creative people are just normal people, they work in the same way as the other and the others, the main motivation is to see their work (on which may have wasted several hours) get used by people.

Look at desktop wallpapers as a perfect example: every graphics guy love to create wallpapers and to share them, a lot of people get into graphics by creating wallpapers. At the same time, of course we can have only one default wallpaper in a certain Fedora release, so the motivational factor for creating wallpapers is low.

The answer here is to provide a place where people can submit their unofficial wallpapers and have them exposed to a large number of users and at the same time a place where users can get a lot of wallpapers (in various styles, colors, formats) and find something fitting their own taste.

This can work either as a gallery hosted by the Fedora Project or as an aggregation of resources posted elsewhere by various authors. Either way, the graphics have to be discoverable and easily searchable.

Here is a cherry we could add on top, to increase even more the motivation from contributors: have as part of Fedora Weekly News a "wallpaper of the week" category.

Note: we have content hosted elsewhere and tagged, some examples: Flickr, deviantART, Fedora Forum, but they are not known enough, not easily discoverable and not tied to a central point, from where the users can learn about them (and all use proprietary services/hosting).

And I have not finished yet, there is another answer: the tools, which are not available or just not emphasised enough.

Here is one example about the tools: Inkscape is currently the star of FOSS graphic applications (and definitely the tools we use and love the most at the Art Team). However, the application is not included by default in any Fedora spin (not in Core, not in Desktop).

The answer I get when I ask about promoting the application to a spin? Usually none. Sometime I may get "create your own Art spin". Which, IMO, is just not good enough. It does not work for promotion, it does not work for attracting new people, it does not work as a selling point for us, it differentiate us from other distros in a negative way.

More webcomics

My plan was to try to produce webcomics on a weekly basis, but something happened and changed my plans: I was stuck almost all day long today without internet access (power failure, then hardware failure, ugly stuff) and as a consequence I got a lot of unplanned free time.

On top of that I received some news (which I somewhat expected) - over SMS, of course, as my net connection was down, from ajoian (we are planning an event) so I couldn't resist:

Now I promise, the next one will be next week (and I already have an idea for it).

PS: do you know all those comics come with sources? I leave to you the little quest of finding the sources, you may get even more goodies there :D

A lame webcomic

Jef talks about Fedora branded webcomics... well, this is something which I can resonate with, as I was thinking about about the same thing for quite some time. But I lacked the much needed impulse.

So here is a lame webcomic, made very quickly in a naive style and with a dull idea, feel free to hate it, but look at the concept and the format:

F10 Gears: Drawing the Gears

While I am still thinking about putting back some blue on the Gears theme proposal for Fedora 10 (and, of course, while counting down the few days remaining until the upcoming Fedora 9 release) here is a short howto about drawing gears, so anyone can learn to make them.

In fact drawing gears is not hard at all, I cheat and use an effect included in the recently released Inkscape 0.46 (available both in F8 and F9) Effects > Render > Gears:

A few parameters to adjust (with Live Preview enabled to see their effect in real time) and we get a toothed wheel:


Now add a circle:


And use the Align and Distribute dialog to align it to the center (I used here "e;Relative to: Biggest Item"):


Then substract the circle from the wheel (you may need to upgroup once, as the Gear effect greated the wheel as a group):


Now to create spokes. Add a rectangle and align it to the center:


Duplicate the rectangle and rotate it 90°:


Select both rectangles and rotate them freely:


Select everything and do an union:


For the middle of the gear create a small circle, align it to the center and do another union:


The hole for the axis is another circle aligned to the center and substracted from the wheel:


And the first gear is done!

Another gears coupled with it must have similar teeth, so use the Gear plugin and change only the number of teeth:


And do a complex mechanism:


You may want to increase the complexity further by adding some parallel gears, which may have their own parameters (as long as they are not coupled with the initial gears):


And that was all for today! Expect a follow-up (maybe next week) about coloring those gears.

Keyboard languages, language communities and national communities

I hate the the Keyboard Indicator applet on my Fedora/GNOME desktop.

My (physical) keyboard, as virtually all keyboards sold in my country (Romania), has an US layout. And I, as a large majority of people around, write without diacritics (ă, â, î, ş, ţ). Except in the cased when I really need diacritics or the euro symbol (€). So I have to change the keyboard configuration, and for my own use the "programmers" version of the Romanian layout (the default Romanian layout in Fedora) is the best: it is identical with the US layout, so the print on my keys remains usable and I get diacritics with AltGr+a for ă, AltGr+s for ş, AltGr+e for € and so on. Which is nice. But I still hate the applet.

As shown in the screenshot above, the applet display a text, "Rou" in my case, instead of flag icons. While I know the argument why the flags were replaced with text a long time ago and it make sense (flags are symbols for countries, which represent political entities, not languages and their use may get you into nasty nationalistic conflicts), I sincerely don't care. I want pretty pictures, my desktop to look nice, with icons on the panel, not with boring text. So the best option for me is to stay with one single layout and not use the applet at all.

I used to argue for the flags, as I believe we should grow up and get past those artificial issues, here is an example: using a Hungarian flag at a public event in Romania in 1990 was absolutely inflammatory, today we grew up as a community and people do not react seeing those flags displayed. But some happenings in the Fedora land made me see the issue from the other perspective and have a first hand understanding of why country-based communities are not such a good idea, so I have now something to put in balance.

I worked recently on a small graphic for the Fedora community of Moldova and I tried to find some way of collaboration with our Fedora Romanian community. I ended by not finding any solid bridge, as they have almost all the valuable content in Russian, but it was an invaluable opportunity for me to contemplate this strange animal: a tri-lingual website, with a short English introduction, a lot of Russian content and some Romanian content.

I wonder what is the purpose of such a website? People searching the web for Fedora content in Russian will land in a Russian website, people searching for Romanian content will land on a Romanian site. If they will open a forum, what's the point for an user to join that forum instead of going to a larger Russian or Romanian forum? This is, IMO, the best example for the futility of a country-based community.

But I still hate the keyboard applet and would prefer it to have flags

PS: And here is a pretty picture for the knowledgeable ones:

Sulphur, boldness, naked people

When talking about SULPHUR, the codename for the upcoming Fedora 9, and desktop themes, I may have give the wrong impression: that I consider the name so dull that is not possible to get some graphics related to it.
This isn't exactly true, I am not so unimaginative that I can't come with a cool (my own idea of cool) image. By the contrary: the first image in my head is about sulphur being the fuel of hell. I can see an image with rivers of molten, red, sulphur, something in the style of the Act IV (Hell) from Diablo II. You know, something that will make you to smell the hell.
But I fully know there are two problems with such an image: 1) it would be very hard to make it in an usable wallpaper and 2) it would be impossible to get a wallpaper acceptable as a default. And to make it fit the Fedora style...

A second idea about Sulphur themes come from the Book of Genesis: "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven." Imagine Fedora as the holy fire from Heavens, punishing the non-believers. A powerful (over-the-top) image but also not usable for the same reasons listed above.

I am a strong supporter of having a bold message sent by our graphics but at the same time I understand such imagery would be beyond bold and just not good. Naked people (of course, no full-frontal nudity) is bold but acceptable, while the molten sulphur from hell is too much.

Since I talked about naked people, I should expand more on that. Of course I don't argue about using naked people in Fedora themes, that would me just lame: it was done, repeating it is unimaginative. I am talking about this level of boldness: can you imagine we can come with something that bold in a release?
I have my doubts: we have a process based on consensus, trying to please everybody, which is pretty much a guarantee crazy ideas (either good or bad) will be filtered out. And even if the Art Team get on crack and go for a bold idea, ignoring all the inevitable negative feed-back, I suspect we would have to get on the same crack the Desktop Team and maybe even Red Hat's legal department.

I may sound obsessive about the naked people in Ubuntu themes, it was long ago, not in an official release and short lived, but I still find it a textbook example for an effective desktop theme as it delivered on at least 3 levels:

• notoriety: it was the early days, the distro was less known. It made people talk about Ubuntu and some even try it and discover that this Linux thingy is not that scary as they expected. Notoriety is essential: no use if you have the best product but nobody knows about it.
• image: it helped build the slogan "Linux for human beings" and the way it is perceived. Perception is just as essential as notoriety. (side questions: then other distros for what what are? for robots?)
• niche: it filled a niche. Yup, Linux is a niche operating system, it fill some niches (even it those niches are numbered in millions of users, they are niches). And one of the primary niches of Ubuntu is rebellious people - those that don't want to go with the crowd and stick it to the man. And how you can show how rebellious and anti-establishment you are than using images of naked people?

Now, can we learn something from that? Can we be bold enough? Think about it while counting down:

F10 themes: Gear - bringing back some blue

Here is one think I do quite often lately: I cornered myself in a situation from where I can't see a clear way out. I learned that in the end you have to find the solution on your own, but this time, being a problem of relatively public interest, graphics for Fedora, I hope somebody will care, I really need a view from the outside of my box.

The problem is: the Gears theme proposal for Fedora 10 as I see it is not blue and this is, in my opinion, a bad thing: a Fedora theme must contain blue (if not as the primary colour, at least as a secondary one) because blue is part of our identity (just as brown is part of Ubuntu's identity or green uis part of SUSE's identity).

What I don't want is a glossy and modern look, like the KDE look, not only because I want to avoid confusion with KDE but also because I search for a steampunk look and feel.

Now here are my ideas, for both current gears representation (golden and paper), please tell me where I am right, where I am wrong, maybe what different vision do you have:

Golden Gears

Here I got a simple idea: cheat (shamelessly).

• The quality of a watch (and probably any clockwork device) can be measured in the number of rubies it contains (ruby bearings), so add some rubies. Which are not that useful for me, as rubies are red/pink.
• Now to the real cheat: replace the rubies with blue sapphires, hopping people will not notice. But this does not look enough to me.
• Add some steel gears, the pocket watch I am using as a visual reference contains both bronze and steel gears.
• Instead of a grey gradient for steel, replace it with a blueish grey gradient
• Now, I feel it is still not enough and went over the top, with something is not a good wallpaper image: add a big blob of blue in the form of a vial (it may be also a blue stone) integrated in the device.
• Another over the top (and bad) idea is to add a blue electric discharge

See below:


Old drawing on old paper

I have a big problem with its current form, is brown ink on [very light] brown paper. Something reminding of Ubuntu. So far I have only a couple of ideas:

• Make the ink blue, keep the paper light brown. I am not sure the colours fit or that the iamge is blue enough
• An "inverted" graphic: make the paper blue (dark blue) with light ink. While it may be close to a blueprint definition, I feel it as a departure from the intial steampunk concept

See below:


And I am not yet talking yet about the next corner: the animated backgrounds (the change depending on the time of the day we have in F8 and F9).

Wile replying me on this topic, stay also focused on Fedora 9, which is around the corner:

Of themes, gears and pocket watches...

There are times when every bit of logic in your brain, every bit of past experience and every bit of common sense tells you to not do something and you still do it. In your personal life, in your professional life, whatever. Such is the case with me proposing the Gears theme for Fedora 10 and here are some reasons why:

• A release name should be first proposed, then cleared by legal and in the end voted by the community, slim chance to know the name so early. And a theme not related to the release name has a weak chance.
• As I see currently, Gears is not blue and this is a big problem, as I believe a theme for Fedora should be blue (I am working on that)
• Starting so early, is a good chance I will get out of steam until the important stages (Round 2-3). Effort dosage is important for motivation and work power.


• Talking about F10 themes now may damage F9, which should draw all the attention and also may be damaged by F9, which draw attention from it.
• Definitely I bore people and will bore them in the coming months repeating the same stuff all over again.
• If this isn't enough, I can add more: people stuff, politics, etc.

But even if your brain warns you against, ju just can't stop yourself, it looks like a match made in heaven and the only way is to go forward.

---

But now to less pathetic things: one of my main sources of inspiration and my most important visual reference is an old (at least pre-WW II) Swiss Omega pocket watch - it is broken currently (I should probably take it to a repair shop) but is complete and is a good shape to be used as a visual reference.

without handy access to a good camera
with good lenses, something
able to do quality macro photos,
why bother? crappy photos made with
may phone are just as good for a lame blog post

Of course this watch has a long history (it belonged to my grandfather) but I only know the recent part of it (like me, as a kid having a grudge against it and trying to break it: with magnets, rewounding the spring the wrong way, etc.)

Count with me: 22, ... 3, 2, 1, Fedora !!!

Now that the "official" release counter for Fedora 9 is live we can all make use of it:

To add it to your own website or blog just copy/paste the following code:

<script id="fedora-banner" type="text/javascript" src="http://fedoraproject.org/static/js/release-counter-ext.js"></script>

Translations in a lot of other languages are also on their way...
Spread the love, build expectation, show the count-down graphic.

Ambassadors Wall

Here are two posters I made for the Ambassadors Wall (Ambassadors are an important institution inside Fedora, people spread around the work promoting Fedora and the wall is a place where they can have their voices heard):

The concepts are similar and straightforward: one is about a cork board where people can put thei message on a post-it note and the other is composed from speech bubbles.
In the end they did not turned in what I imagined initially, I dreamed about having the notes written in a lof of native languages with various scripts and charsets to better show the multicultural aspect and maybe having them written by hand and accompanied by a photo for a human touch (but good look with gathering photos which may be used for print).

Anyway, I am quite happy with the result.

Do your own

Now it you want to customize the poster with your own note/voice, is not easy to add a post-it or bubble, the space is used at maximum already, but grab the SVG sources (cork board, voices), open in Inkscape, delete an existing note, and replace with your. Or do a complete pack of 15 notes.

Printing

As some printing house will not be happy with your SVG, here is how to trick them: either export a PNG at the desired resolution, import in GIMP and convert to TIFF or just import the SVG with GIMP and set the size/DPI at import and save as TIFF (for example, an A3 poster at 300 DPI is 3508x4960 px).
Anyone should just shut up when provided with TIFF images.