Hi all! I was told over at Cricut that all those cute little animals I see on everyone's LO's are mostly created in Inkscape. I would like to know if I need this program to create teddy bears, giraffes, etc. or if I can just use the shapes found in SCAL. any help out there???
gina
Inkscape
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jasenj1
- Posts: 364
- Joined: Mon Sep 28, 2009 3:06 am
- Location: Newport News, VA, USA; SCAL 2.044-Expression; SCAL 3-Cameo; Mac; Inkscape 0.48; GIMP 2.6
Re: Inkscape
Is "it depends" a cop-out answer?
Inkscape is a powerful - and fairly complicated - full featured drawing program similar to Adobe Illustrator (which is a "professional grade" drawing tool). You can get by learning only a little of it - I know I have. There are lots of tutorials around to help you get started using it. But if you are intimidated by complicated software with lots of menus you don't understand, and buttons that don't work quite the way you expect, and dialog boxes with lots of options you don't know what to do with - then I would say skip Inkscape.
Personally, my wife will never use Inkscape. It's too complicated and the learning curve too steep for her. She's a decent MS Word jockey, can do some Excel, and surfs the web with ease, but she doesn't have the inclination to learn something on the order of Inkscape - that's my job.
SCAL has some basic shapes and ways you can combine them to do basic drawing, but if you plan to go beyond very basic things then I think you'll be frustrated with SCAL. It's NOT a drawing program - and I hope it never tries to become one. It provides some basic shapes to let you quickly bang out something simple - maybe with some work a little more than simple.
Anyone else have a say?
- Jasen.
Inkscape is a powerful - and fairly complicated - full featured drawing program similar to Adobe Illustrator (which is a "professional grade" drawing tool). You can get by learning only a little of it - I know I have. There are lots of tutorials around to help you get started using it. But if you are intimidated by complicated software with lots of menus you don't understand, and buttons that don't work quite the way you expect, and dialog boxes with lots of options you don't know what to do with - then I would say skip Inkscape.
Personally, my wife will never use Inkscape. It's too complicated and the learning curve too steep for her. She's a decent MS Word jockey, can do some Excel, and surfs the web with ease, but she doesn't have the inclination to learn something on the order of Inkscape - that's my job.
SCAL has some basic shapes and ways you can combine them to do basic drawing, but if you plan to go beyond very basic things then I think you'll be frustrated with SCAL. It's NOT a drawing program - and I hope it never tries to become one. It provides some basic shapes to let you quickly bang out something simple - maybe with some work a little more than simple.
Anyone else have a say?
- Jasen.
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firstcut
- Posts: 1822
- Joined: Sun Dec 21, 2008 6:19 pm
- Location: FL; SCAL1, SCAL2; Mac; Ink .47, AI CS4
- Contact:
Re: Inkscape
Gina,
Not sure what cute animals you are talking about, but chances are they were not created either by drawing in Inkscape or by putting together basic shapes in SCAL. More likely they are characters from a TrueType font, or are autotraced from a coloring book or other image off the web. Since you can autotrace with SCAL2, you don't even need Inkscape for that anymore. With SCAL2, most people can get along for quite a while with fonts, free svgs and autotracing images, no Inkscape required.
Not sure what cute animals you are talking about, but chances are they were not created either by drawing in Inkscape or by putting together basic shapes in SCAL. More likely they are characters from a TrueType font, or are autotraced from a coloring book or other image off the web. Since you can autotrace with SCAL2, you don't even need Inkscape for that anymore. With SCAL2, most people can get along for quite a while with fonts, free svgs and autotracing images, no Inkscape required.
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scrapinn4me
- Posts: 14
- Joined: Tue Nov 17, 2009 11:43 am
Re: Inkscape
Thanks for the info....I will look over on the cricut board and find an example to post a link here so you all can see what I'm speaking about.
Gina
Gina