I’ve been AWOL again. Here’s why; I’ve recently acquired a car. The problem is I can’t drive, so it’s taken quite a bit of my free time to learn and for the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a big new project for my business. It’s taking a lot of coding and I’m a little bit rusty so it’s all taking a long time. But I haven’t forgotten about the blog.

I had planned this week to show you a new extension for Inkscape I heard about through Planet Inkscape but I’m still trying to figure out how to get it working on OS X. It seems that it’s not as simple as installing a new Python Library so it might be a while before you see anything on that.

I hope to be back with a new tutorial on Friday. In the mean time if you’d like to request a tutorial (I’m in an Inkscape mood this week) just let me know.

I haven’t forgotten that last week I promised you a couple of photo restoration tutorials. Well, the one I had planned for today turned out to be pretty complex. In order to cover everything really thoroughly I’ll be using this one photograph for a few tutorials including some instruction on using GIMP.

I’m going to an art show tonight so if it’s ready before I’ll publish Part One and if not, expect it tomorrow. Here’s what you’ve got to look forward to:

• Restoring a Torn Photo in GIMP
• Improving Damage, Water Stains and Discolouration
• Detailed Study of the Scissor Tool
• …plus some bonus material that I haven’t finalised yet.

Since this will be quite advanced, I look forward to your input; particularly if you have alternative methods or an opinion on the final piece.

It’s Friday, I’m feeling a bit lazy so today I’m just going to point you in the direction of some interesting Inkscape tutorials that you might want to take a look at over the weekend.

I have some major bug fixing to do on one of my other sites but will prepare some shiny new tutorials for next week!

Illustrating Tomato is a nice tutorial from kalaalog.com. It’s not so much the tomatoes I find interesting, but the technique of first hand drawing them and then making shapes around the drawing. Gives a nice hand-drawn finish.

Inkscape Docs Interpolate Tutorial - if you haven’t got this far through the Inkscape documentation take a look at this well-written tutorial on interpolate. It’s a very cool tool in inkscape for morphing from one shape or colour to another.

Gradients to Path is such a simple yet brilliant idea. A really easy way to make a gradient or abstract shape using markers on a line.

3D Text by Nicu is an easy to follow tutorial on getting an embossed look on text using the blur filter. Could work well with non-text objects too.

That should keep you going until next week when I’ll be concentrating on some fairly heavy going GIMP tutorials on photo restoration. Have a great weekend!